Posted: February 28, 2011   by Andrew Mottaz, CEO and Co-Founder

ProtoShare 5 is a huge milestone for us. We've worked on it for about 8 months--completed two releases of 3.9 in the meantime--and put in a huge amount of effort making sure we did things right.

I love Software-as-a-Service. We use Salesforce, Google Docs, BaseCamp and, of course, ProtoShare. Being able to easily share work and collaborate with colleagues is a revolutionary improvement to me. And yet, SaaS can be frustrating. As much as I love Salesforce, it sometimes drives me crazy waiting for pages to load. I've also noticed that the more I use it, the more those delays bother me. When I was learning the app, my mind was so busy absorbing information, that the short waits for pages were more of a relief than a problem. But now that I know what I want and where to get it, every extra click, and every extra page load is frustrating.

During the last 18 months, something else has been happening in technology that is monumental for SaaS companies. The browser wars are on again, and one major point of competition is significantly accelerated JavaScript engines. This has been great for ProtoShare, as we've seen our speeds increase through browser upgrades alone. But we also realized that we weren't doing everything we could to leverage these advances.