Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind the look that much, but it's painfully slow. When an application gains a animated splash screen I know that it's time has come. I'm using a Chromebook, so in a way a Google blessed device and it's annoyingly slow. I'm switching to basic HTML view. If it will disappear I will get off gmail for good.

View on HN

Painfully slow, that's how I describe it too. Right now I'm on a remote location, where internet is delivered by antennas, bandwidth is not much of a problem but latency is high. I've got used to it for most sites, but not with Gmail, Gmail is an exception, it makes me doubt if I lost connection or not, so I usually open HN to test it and 99% of the time it's Gmail's fault not my connection's. I prefer to use Inbox since it loads twice as fast, too bad Google is shooting it down soon.

I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM and a core i5. The experience using Firefox with the new Gmail UI with this laptop is nothing but sluggish. I have to switch back to the old UI. I am not sure what I would do after Google takes away the old UI. What the hell is going on at Google?

Firefox has severe performance issues on high dpi displays on macOS. It’s gotten better in the latest nightlies but still an issue. As an unfortunate (for your eyes) workaround you can do Get Info on Firefox.app and enable low resolution compatibility mode, then restart Firefox.

> What the hell is going on at Google?

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.

Change for change’s sake. I feel like F/OSS has a potential advantage here in being able to take the time to build durable, long-lived, stable software.

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.

Their culture seems to be based on rotating new product managers in every 2-3 years. It's logical that a new manger will want to make their mark and prove they "did something".

Agreed. It is extremely slow, esp. on older computers to the point of being unusable. Another app reinvents the wheel and becomes useless.

Yeah my Commodore has issues with Gmail as well.

Hey that's pretty funny, but I'm on a 2014 Thinkpad with an i7, and it's slow and stuttery for me as well.

Thanks for confirmation, I'm on DSL so wasn't sure if it was just my super slow connection.

Also, nice coincidence that those multiple ask hackernews questions about alternatives to gmail popping up before this release last week.

it's especially bad on Firefox. With that, and the fact that Google is killing Inbox, it feels like time to look for alternatives.

Sure, but where? There are not that much email providers that will live forever and won't change your UX and have mobile apps, and... and...

Get a domain from Gandi. $15/year and includes email service. You can either use the email directly, or forward it somewhere else so you can keep using the same email address forever even if you change providers.

This is no different than just using Gmail. Eventually yet another service is gone and you have to adjust your workflow to another email app.

First, if you use your own mail clients rather than the vendor's interface, you don't need to change apps when you change email providers.

Second, even if you do need to change apps, you don't need to change addresses if you have your own domain.

I have no idea how you can compare Gmail to Thunderbird + your own domain + any decently sized email provider. It's absolutely trivial to move domains and email providers and using a client like Thunderbird means your experience remains consistent (and performant) over time.

Wow, didn't know that. Seems like a pretty good deal considering they are known as one of the better registrars. I will keep it in mind in case I have to look for alternative of either name.com or mailbox.org.

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.

Well, if you don't want to switch providers, you can just use Thunderbird or your client of choice to access your inbox with a UI that you can trust won't change drastically.

fastmail.com - I used gmail since the good old days when I bought an invite on ebay. Yesterday, I switched to fastmail with my own domain. I'm not looking back.

> fastmail

You are aware they're an Australian company that will be forced to provide Oz government access to your account?

How is that relevant to UI performance or stability?

It's indirectly relevant, because apart from UX issues, especially here on HN, I believe that people should also be aware of security and privacy issues.

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/

Nearly every service provider complies with legally issued requests. The ones that don't are either lying to you or fly by night operations that I wouldn't trust my business with.

I’ve been using Zoho’s workplace for over a year now, no complaints. I use Thunderbird on Arch/Windows 10, Airmail on OSX, and Outlook on iOS.

I just got it for email hosting at $3/mo, but they provide a host of other tools aimed towards businesses.

Mailspring is nice.

Posteo works quite nice and they are very privacy-focussed, e.g. they release yearly transparency reports about requests from authorities.

https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report

I must have a super computer because it is blazing fast for me after an initial 1-2s load time.

Hmm. I haven't perceived any slow down. Especially not like others here are saying. Gmail still seems pretty quick to me.

Are you using a computer from the last 4 years and sitting one mile away from where the app was created? Conditions aren't the same everywhere, and you can look to see how much memory it's using, which is a lot, and it's unconcerned with reliability and redundancy in communication with the server.

It's fast for me too, apart from the one to two second load time for opening an email, inbox, filter, spam boxes etc.

What kind of connection do you have? Because I live in a rural area, have slow internet connection and the only site I’m having difficulties navigating is Gmail.

Also, the new UI is a complete UX disaster.

100% agree, infact I now use it as an example to our CTO who is absolutely deadset on actively spending time on replacing our inhouse expert UI frontends (currently written in native UIs, blazing fast etc) with web frontends. Yes they can be effective + fast, but telling a room of native devs to convert everything to web will end badly if not given the proper support.

That splash screen is pretty noisy if you have a touch of synesthesia.

It's the final straw for me. I mean, for me Gmail was an important tool for daily business. I choose this tool for certain reasons, but now that most of them are gone, why stick to it? I'm migrating my accounts right now and it's actually fun.

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?

This seems to be the case for most Google services. I use Google DoubleClick, AdSense, and Analytics, and they seem to get slower, and more clunky with every update. I was using DoubleClick yesterday, and I was waiting about 10 seconds for every page to load. Then I searched for help on a topic and I was sent to the Google product forums, which nearly offered an equally poor experience. The frustration reminded me of my years with dial-up, even though it's 20 years in the future, and I have an 80 Mb/s internet connection. And of course the most basic features don't always work correctly with Google services now, such as being able to open a link in a new window, or being able to navigate without the back button breaking in some way.

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.

To me it is annoying slow to open gmail, but the navigation is mostly very fast.

Same. I hope keeping the previous design as an option won't be removed.

I describe it as too slow too. I wonder if they tested it before pushing it live to the world.

Countries, areas or users with slow internet connections should be given the option to use the classic UI, which in my case was much faster.

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

I dont have any issues. Lighting fast. Maybe they put you in a test bucket.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com