The new UI is painful to look at, to be honest. Anyone from Google here want to mention to the Gmail team that the new UI is going to chase long-term users like myself off the platform?
Also, nice coincidence that those multiple ask hackernews questions about alternatives to gmail popping up before this release last week.
Second, even if you do need to change apps, you don't need to change addresses if you have your own domain.
Mailbox.org as of now seems to be good except that they have started to either reply to emails quite late or sometimes simply ignore it[0] and the general lack of non-German language pages across their portal [1].
[0] Maybe because they have officially stopped anything but community/forum support for paying customers in €1 and €2.5 per month plans -https://mailbox.org/en/fees-and-conditions/
[1] https://help.mailbox.org/servicedesk/customer/user/login?des... Yes, one can guess or use Google translate but there's no translated page for this.
You are aware they're an Australian company that will be forced to provide Oz government access to your account?
I wrote the comment especially in the light of people tripping across parent's recommendation. (There are lots of other threads here on HN indicating how people wish to migrate from gmail to something else, due to other Google/Alphabet Inc issues.)
"Where requests for access are issued legally, we comply." [0]
[0] https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/
I just got it for email hosting at $3/mo, but they provide a host of other tools aimed towards businesses.
https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report
Also, the new UI is a complete UX disaster.
Iterations are going on. There is a school of thought that believes any kind of movement is progress. May it movement into good or bad direction. Thats why companys regulary rehaul their apps, the design and corperate identity. It always end with some people becoming unhappy, but hopefully more people being happy.
The web-everything world we live in right now has led to a cambrian explosion in new UI metaphors and visual design. I can only hope at some point we all wake up and decide that GNUMail running on GNU Hurd has gotten really stable, and that maybe we should all just re-adopt open protocols and native apps.
I guess the way Google works is: let’s ship something quickly(1) and then slowly(2) improve it.
(1) quickly: 2 years
(2) slowly: 4 years
One thing I still don't understand is why they wouldn't let people to use the old interface. Come on, it's just the UI, why force your taste on everyone?
Without question, Google services are the worst I currently use in my daily life. I would honestly be embarrassed to have my name attached to many of their products.
I used to visit Google News multiple times per day. Then the UX went to hell there too. Each iteration became worse. After the latest changes, it became so unbearably hideous and clunky that I couldn't stand it anymore. I got mad every time I loaded the site. But years of keyboard memory still had me typing in the URL constantly, getting mad every time it loaded up. I finally black holed it in /etc/hosts to break the habit.
Gmail is in a similar state now. The new UI is hideous and clunky. And on the engineering side, it takes multiple seconds to load up. I thought Googlers were supposed to be known for their engineering competence?
Calendar? Bleh. It's still in a tolerable state, but visually the previous release was easier to work with.
Bring back contrast. Bring back visual dividers. Stop with the clown buttons like the mega "Compose"... these are tools we use for years and we had our first-run experiences over a decade ago.
Fire whoever is driving your god awful UX on web.
The lack of consistency and common sense is unbelievable.
The only reason why Android has a user-friendly UI is because Google copied the design from Apple in 2007.
I have the feeling that UX specialists are actually the problem. When you employ people to work on UX and design, well, they will work on it, even if there is nothing to do. So you get periodic redesigns that improve nothing but justify the existence of a bunch of people whose purpose in life is to propose UX changes.
That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).
The new GMail seems like a more functional “new Reddit”. It achieves a certain look and was probably metric driven, but didn’t really address what users care about.
As a casual GMail user, I like it. But it would drive me crazy if I had to work with it all day with my work mail volume.
The "random content boxes and buttons floating in a sea of pure white" seems to be the latest awful trend in web design. I get that borders and shadows are out of style, but they are necessary for visually grouping things together.
And it looks like they removed the option to turn Undo off, so now I have to wait 5 seconds to my message to actually be sent.
I'm so used to Google products being fast and feeling almost like a desktop application. This new interface feels like a web app from 2000's. Makes me want to go back to using Thunderbird for mail.
Treat users like adults; respect them. If you (UI designer) think you know better: you don't, you're just cocky. If you can't think of another way to get users to accept your new design: it's probably because it sucks, and you shouldn't have made something no-one asked for in the first place.
(Wait, are we talking about GMail, or Windows 10?)
I remember a time when search engines, web based emails and other such things were so painfully slow and cluttered. Then there was this upstart with a funny name and single box to type in your search term. I switched because the air was fresh there.
There used to be a lot of noise about why don't they use that hot new eye candy, much like we have the same question asked about HN. Eventually they won.
On the lookout for the next plot of fresh air.
These days they just don't seem to care any more.
The unnecessary animations irk me. I'm clocking 5-10 seconds to load and render my inbox, on a quad-core i7 with oodles of RAM and a fat network pipe. Whereas the basic view loads in 700 ms...
Basic view is 9 requests for 24 kb...
The problem with this is that this is done dynamically on load, and there's a delay. So you can be scrolling through old emails, and then suddenly where everything is on the screen changes because new content finished loading in the middle of what you were looking at.
Plus it makes the height of emails inconsistent, which is significantly harder to parse visually.
It's kind of a small thing, but it honestly should not have passed UI review processes at all. Don't fucking load new content in the middle of what people are interacting with. It's 101 level stuff here.
Edit: apparently there's a setting for "Default", "Comfortable", or "Compact", and that email account was on "Default" but should've been on "Compact", which is way better.
Took this from a company's website [0] who is trying to reinvent an email client. I have to agree, the new Gmail experience is definitely not something its original creator would be very proud of!
And GMail, bless it, when I login through the company's system clocks me through to a "Choose which account" system. My reaction is to open a new tab and login again, and it usually takes me straight through to the actual email without repeating the request for credentials.
The whole thing feels clunky, slow, and confused underneath. I don't much care about the look, that comes and goes, fashions change, but the experience as a whole has become painful.
If you don't want to do that (e.g. because you want all your email tabs in the same window), you can just use the account switcher on the top right, or just change the 0 in the URL to a 1 or 2 or whatever.
1) This conversation (and complaints) already happened, repeatedly and in-depth, months ago on various internal lists
2) The response - the Decision is made, you're change averse/not a representative user
3) Whichever PMs/leads/designers involved had an OKR to do Something, so Something had to be done
It's funny that that's used like it's a negative thing.
No-one wants their tools to change out from under them. Shuffling stuff around for no reason subverts learned skill in using a tool, decreasing its usefulness. And the only purpose of a tool is to be useful.
The fact that Google makeovers are that – makeovers – rather than incremental enhancements, tells me that they don't really have a purpose beyond looking good, or allowing some internal rearchitecting that is incompatible with the old design. If the changes are really productivity enhancements, why save them up to roll out as a distracting redesign?
I feel like being forced to choose between two bad versions of GMail.
Bonus, even read your emails offline!
<s>Innovation!</s>
(They did spin off Opera Mail as a separate app, but I see no point in it, since it's just Opera 12 with the browser part disabled).
It's a bit clunky, but it's the best for serious people.
It was/is great, but I didn't find a compelling reason for myself to shell some bucks over their way vs. using Opera Mail or Thunderbird. What are the killer features for you?
It does have per-account adjustable syncing periods, and you can click a big ol' button to refresh immediately.
Having an API unable to support two clients (Classic and New) would be embarassing from an engineering POV.
And from an UX POV, it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users. There are all kind of reasons why a given person might prefer UI a to b (a being older having nothing to do).
As you reach more humans, you have to embrace diversity. The views from a handful of hipster designers in SF shouldn't irreversibly impact how the rest of the world interacts with their computers.
You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.
It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.
They ditched the original – and best – UI years ago. Each iteration has dropped visual cues and made it harder for the eye to distinguish elements from each other. GMail has just been relegated to spam duty for me since then.
Basic HTML mode at least still has a decent UI.
I had the option to switch back to "classic" a couple of days back, but now it's gone.
Make sure you are logged in before clicking on the link above. Let me know if I can still help.
No. There's are 3 interfaces: html, previous UI and new UI forced on users now. New UI apparently contains some features from Inbox product, and is much slower. You could opt out to use the old UI (dubbed Classic by Gmail) until yesterday. Now I can only choose between new UI and html.
It is slightly slower, but I like the look and enjoy working in it.
While I dream of doing it, I think it would be hard to PM something as popular as Gmail. Once you reach a nine figure user count, any change you make will be met with millions of unhappy people...
I'm not using the most powerful machine (i7-8550U + 8gb of RAM) and I'm running Chrome 69 on Windows 10. It's a little slower than the previous version, but nothing I'd call unbearable. In fact if I'm being really honest, I'm not even sure if it is slower, or if I'm just saying that it is to fit in. :)
I urge you to read FAQ on HN etiquette.
You've responded to the worst possible interpretation of what I said. I can assure you that I wasn't prejudging how people would respond to me because frankly, when I worry about those things, my writing goes to hell. Instead, I was trying to be friendly and poke fun of myself.
When that happens, I will likely give up on reddit entirely.
What's interesting is that I remember how devs and designers were frustrated when they were asked to build a web version of their desktop apps finding it too hard to fit into new constrains. Now, I wont be surprised if web-devs/designers feel frustrated too trying to build a desktop app with a mental model of HTML documents and page reloads which is what the new gmail UX looks like to me (the old one was not better, I just got used to it).
If it was up to me, I would focus only on performance and accessibility. I would cut all animations and use much simpler (bare text if needed) ways to present information. Today when you can be fast on web, no need to compensate lack of it with too much content and animations.
Yes, I think no UI-designer job should exist full time in one product. At some time the design should be done. If not, you either screwed up or the design is already great and from now on you will screw up.
Windows 8/10 is another example. From Windows 7 it just went downhill.
Gmail has been my last reservation on dropping Google entirely, and I think this is the last straw for me.
Hard refresh of the page has it returning all my emails within 680ms at which point I can click on stuff.
For some reason there's a bit of a delay on the favicon, but even then that's all loaded and usable in < 2 seconds.
With the new UI I can sort of do something around the 15 second mark, it becomes completely useable by 30 seconds, but there's still a bunch of stuff happening over the network. It finally got quiet around the 1 1/2 minute mark.
This is absolutely nuts.
Now, I don’t really care about Gmail’s UI because I use IMAP. Apple Mail improved their UI just enough that Gmail’s regressions took it below the line. But I don’t really care, because Gmail’s spam filtering is still much better than Fastmail, which I know from having tried switching for a couple years.
Second, I know for a fact that there are plenty of Google employees here. It is funny to see the radio silence. Somewhere within Google there is an email thread generating the HR compliant reply for this thread.
On GMail - I like the update. I find it better than the earlier UI. I use it work, I use it at home and I haven't noticed any slowness myself even when I am not on the Google network.
I agree about the silence on the Calendar side. At present, Gmail has a thought-out theme function but Calendar has all the themeing stripped out. Gmail and Calendar should be consistent. I hope this is rectified at some point.
I checked with Developer Tools, didnt't see anything resembling Dart in Gmail (and it is not as slow as DFP). But there is 2.8 Mb JS file and 1.3 Mb CSS file (loaded 3 times, don't know why). I am not sure if this is really necessary to display a list of 20 newest emails. Also, a hangouts widget loads additional 600 kb of JS and 600 Kb of CSS.
I'm using an item from "Labs":
> Google Calendar gadget > by Ben K and Garry B
But Labs is gone in the new UI and this gadget isn't available under any of the new areas.
- just a user
1. I don’t agree with it, and
2. Gmail team is already painfully aware that any given change will be unappealing to a subset of users.
3. They are probably already here, taking note, considering.
Unfortunately we can’t all have a custom UI written exactly to our specifications. Gmail team has to try to do what they think is best for most users. For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox, or you can write your own userscript or use an IMAP client.
I would love if Gmail team went forward and shared a bit about how they get data on what's best for most users. This would probably alleviate many complaints, by letting complainers (like me) know how dissimilar they are to majority of users.
> For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox,
Given the state of browser extension market, this is inviting users to selfpwn.
> or you can write your own userscript
Isn't this against the TOS? Even if it isn't, this solves the problem only for couple frustrated users with enough knowledge and too much time on their hands.
> or use an IMAP client.
Fortunately, yes, for now. I hope Google doesn't decide to abandon IMAP.
This isn't what most people are asking for though, they just want Google to not make the UX worse. Increasing the page load time and making a bunch of styling changes for no appreciable benefit makes the app worse, not better. If a lot of people are wishing the dev team had just done nothing, it's probably a sign that the changes aren't warranted.
If they improve the speed and make it work as fast as the previous version did, I think most users will learn to live with the new UI.
The fact that you think so makes it hard to take anything else you've said seriously.
Or do you mean that a change which regresses for a small number of users while improving for most is bad? In which case this is not correct and I'm happy to elaborate on why.
If most users are like most non-techies I know, I assure you, they do care. There's just nothing they can do, beyond telling first couple people they encounter that they hate the new UI, and carrying on with their lives. Because what are they going to do? Move 10 years of their e-mail history to Microsoft and IM/phone 500 people about their new address?
--
This is, by the way, my fully generic response to "the market shows users like web bloat". No, they don't. They just don't have a choice but to accept it.
The gmail product forums, monitoring sites like reddit, HN, and Twitter, focus groups and UX studies, internal dogfooders and trusted external testers, metrics from experimental or holdback groups, etc.
This is a place where the metaphors of material design subtract more value than they add.
The charts are almost always broken, clicking on 1M will not show today's levels.
And earlier I could just put a /FB or /GOOG in the URL to get to that page instantly, now the URL is some 100s of long char string (sorry, I am from C/C++ world so dont know the exact terms for these)
Then there is the news events map to the chart, used to be cool to see what caused the dip/bump, but not there now..
I have since moved to Yahoo finance, but that has too much ads and autoplay videos.
My theory is that network interruptions during pageload cause the balance of these problems, as one of the environments I'm most frequently in has low-quality wifi. Haven't had time to do profiling or even so much as crack Devtools on the problem, but I casually imagine that they are dynamically loading a lot of libs, so a broken pipe or a dropped packet or two would certainly immobilize the UI until TCP/HTTP had gone through the dance of either resending the packets in question, or teardown/setup.
That said, the previous edition of Gmail -- possibly because it was lighter weight -- rarely misbehaved this way.
I believe we are seeing with gmail some of the current limits of the SPA designs. So it's not Google's fault, per se, and we should expect more and more sites to begin to evince the same drawbacks as the SPA model ineluctably takes over. (It really is superior.)
Eventually, problems in SPA will be resolved by improvements at the backend, on the wire, or by way of improvements to webpack, or the browsers themselves.
Your network connection might be aggravating the issue, as quick look at the Network tab show it issues a metric crapton of small requests (on my machine lasting for more than a minute after opening the page). But I do have a decent enough pipe, and still get ridiculous load time + performance problems. And so seem other people commenting here about performance.
The problems of today's SPAs are mostly self-inflicted.
1. The page will reset and reload, or,
2. Your keys will trigger a keyboard shortcut and then truly, good god damn luck because who knows how many pages of emails you'll archive with no way to undo (the toast that appears for 3 seconds is NOT sufficient, especially if you keep typing.)
Hangouts, YouTube, and Gmail are embarrassing to use. And that's not even discussing what happens in Firefox where everything is somehow nearly twice as slow.
edit: Oh, let me say, it's bad enough that if I'm on a laptop where I don't want to keep the bloated Gmail tab around in mem/cpu, I have reverted back to using the Web 1.0 / mobile-esque version of Gmail. (Which has it's own problems, attachments are broken, etc).
Just a mess. I am actively trying to move away from Google. Unfortunately, I can't find anything that is half-as-good as Google Photos.
If it is causing you actual (physical / emotional / psychological / spiritual) pain - why continue to inflict that on yourself? You are in charge of whether or not you choose to use Google, nobody else.
However, I doubt that pain is the clearest or most precise way to express what is happening here. My guess is that a better word would be "frustrated" or "angry" - emotional reactions that are potentially uncomfortable (so, OK, a form of pain), depending on one's capacities and experience. Those reactions are completely and totally valid.
I find it so funny how something so relatively trivial and ephemeral is turned into such a personal affront. Nobody is trying to inflict pain on you with their user interface desicions.
I'm a self hosted MS Exchange + Outlook user, so I'm being purely devils advocate here.
The new gmail UI is so cluttered. Full of unnecessary stuff. Hope they bring back the option to revert back to classic UI. Mine is missing already.
1. Privacy concerns
2. The new and painfully slow Gmail UI
I think I finally realized that there are no free things in live and you usually have to sacrifice something. Here it's privacy.
And why can't I tap a phone number and save that to contacts without several extra steps?
It's slow as most already noted. But I also find that it's much more mentally exhaustive - it's maybe a bit more beautiful and fancy, but it's not what I look for in work - I want things simple, well aligned and as readable as possible. I've tried for several days the new interface and it was really a big downgrade from the previous UI.
I also get gmail from another account, and he gets mine.
At least it is not as bad as Skype. Woke up one day a week ago, hit Upgrade, and now Skype doesn't work -- whatsoever. Nothing I can do.
Essentially if I didn't have experience as a level 3 support engineer, I'd be out of business.
As one who has only ever used Gmail with a mail client, I'm not seeing any obvious differences since the last time I had to log into the web interface to set a few rules, except an unusually colorful Compose button - which might have been there for a while for all I know.
this makes going through the inbox in the morning very frustrating
Now there's only starred and unstarred. (Be careful how you use 'important', as Google tries to learn from that and gets it wrong.)
So as of today I'm forwarding all my email to protonmail. This was just the push I needed to start switching over.
I have another weird issue happening though with my second Gmail account on Chrome. Sometimes when I login, it refreshes during the flash screen of Gmail logo and logs me out automatically going back to the login page. Has that happened to anyone?
On the other hand, youtube works flawlessly. It's mindblowing what is possible when a company has the resources to optimize their software.
And, of course, I'm also ditching Chrome for Firefox (and Tor Browser) as well.
Well done, Google. You finally forced my hand.
I had left my phone at home while visiting a friend. I was shocked to learn I could not view iCloud.com (and my e-mails) from my girlfriend's phone without signing in to the iPhone itself via settings.
Look into Fastmail.com or Outlook Premium.
Luckily I can still revert back on GSuite for now.
For comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Outlook, Evolution is well-integrated into GNOME, while KMail (part of Kontact) is well-integrated into KDE.
Alternatively, Geary (GTK+ 3 based, adopted by GNOME), Pantheon Mail (Elementary's fork of Geary), Claws Mail (lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Sylpheed (lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Trojitá (lightweight Qt 5 based), Kube (Qt 5 based, integrates with Kolab Now), and Mutt (text-based) also work on Linux.
All of these applications are free and open-source, and some of them also work on Windows and macOS.
Thunderbird: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
Evolution: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/
KMail: https://www.kde.org/applications/internet/kmail/
Geary: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary
Pantheon Mail: https://github.com/elementary/mail
Claws Mail: https://www.claws-mail.org/
Sylpheed: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
Trojitá: http://trojita.flaska.net/
Kube: https://kube-project.com/
Mutt: http://www.mutt.org/
It seems that most of the hate is either about (a) a slower loading screen or (b) worse design. The latter is debatable, but the former is just a ridiculous complaint. At worst, the load seems to be around 0.5 seconds slower on a mediocre internet connection, so if you can't spare an extra 5 seconds a day from refreshing Gmail 10 times a day, you should consider checking your email a little bit less often.