Microsoft Outlook HTML Rendering Is Much Better Than GMail

You would have probably heard about the massive #fixoutlook campaign running on Twitter and making headlines across the blogosphere. Around 25000 twitter users joined the campaign so far and building pressure on Microsoft to fix the HTML rendering engine of Outlook 2010. Microsoft responded to this and explained the reasons why they are adopting a specific HTML rendering engine even though it is poor in following the HTML email standards.

It is good to see people coming out and expressing their dislikes and media picking up these stories and publishing them on front pages. As usual, whenever some issue like this surfaces, media and blogs bashes Microsoft for not following the web standards. But the same crowd never speak much about Google when there is something wrong with them.

Let’s take the HTML rendering issue of Outlook and GMail. Even though GMail is the most powerful and rich functional web mail client, it hardly follows any of the HTML mail standards. When compared, Microsoft’s Outlook is much better than  GMail and here is the picture comparing the same.

 

The first block is the reference rending of a HTML mail and the next two blocks are rendering images of GMail and Outlook 2007.

Is there someone who is talking about? Did you hear of any campaign to protest against this? Probably you wouldn’t have. I’m not saying people should not criticize Microsoft. It’s good that people are opposing when something is broken. But lets be fair and criticize everyone equally and impartially.