As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to back this up.
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?
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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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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 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.