Gmail's Simple Html Mode is much better than standard mode

The old new gmail was pretty excellent. I gave up completely on the new one and reverted to the basic html version. It took forever to load, and I continually ran into the "this operation hasn't completed yet" dialog when I'd delete some mails and then tried to navigate to some other site. Just very half-baked and sloppy, it should never have gotten out the door in the current state.

I see this too much nowadays, people who want to use cool technologies to make new software, without knowledge if it is better for the user. It is not progress, it is change.

I've been using the simple HTML mode myself for the past few weeks. Much quicker and nicer, and refreshingly antiquated! Reminds me of my old Mindspring webmail.

The new interface worked reasonably well for me on my work PC, but not on my home PC (which is admittedly out of date). Clicking a new message would cause the "Loading..." label to pop up and never go away. The message wouldn't load unless I did a full Ctrl+F5 reload of the page.

I missed some of the automatic categorization of messages in the new interface, but now think seeing things is one big list is clearer. And labels still work to see subsets.

Shhhh. Don't let Google hear you. They'll remove HTML mode and force everyone to use the new site.

The new Gmail takes so long to load and organize itself. I really do like the speed of classic html. It'd be nice if more web services had such "low bandwith" modes.

The new new gmail is flawed in many ways. In particular, the new gmail removed the the method to hover over an email in list and quickly find all emails from a sender. Am I the only user of that feature? Also, the number of times I've had load errors on the newest version already exceeds the number of load errors I've had in the last year for the previous version. Back to old school html gmail is the solution.

Many of you have been discussing speed, but one of the things I liked most about the old GMail was the look. This is surprising, because my taste tends toward minimalism and the muted colors of today. GMail used of a variety of colors (blue, green, orange, etc.) but there was an elegance to them. It's not just blue, it's a very specific shade of blue (#C3D9FF). The confirmation messages aren't just "orange," they're #FAD163. I've spent my whole life in art and have been a graphic designer, and these colors seem to me hand-picked for maximal retinal happiness.

The style was not just in GMail but also Calendar, Google News, Reader, and the main search itself. For a while Google hosted the articles for the Associated Press, and I looked for them among the versions of each story in Google News. The width of the text column seemed to me precisely right. The image carousel, when included, was easy to use and lightweight compared to the monstrosities in other news sites.

I always ascribed it to Google's data-driven design decisions. In 2009 a well-known graphic designer quit Google shortly after starting, because Google made him user-test every tweak. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better." (https://www.cnet.com/news/google-designer-leaves-blaming-dat...)

But I also think a lot of credit goes to Kevin Fox, Senior User Experience Design Lead, 2003-8 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/person/). He recently tweeted a article showcasing several Google products at their inception (https://twitter.com/kfury/status/1045169856998305792) though the subheading is, "Google didn’t always get design. In fact, the earliest versions of some of its top products were downright homely." I couldn't disagree more.

I'm unsure how credit should be distributed. Paul Buchheit is GMail's "creator" (He's also a partner at YCombinator). A history of GMail is in Time magazine, http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/. He left Google in 2006 to form Friendfeed, which bears a strong resemblance to Google's products (http://thomashawk.com/2009/04/friendfeed-is-for-winners-frie...). Other former Google employees cofounded Friendfeed: Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. But they also hired Kevin Fox.

Regardless, in the early 2000s I loved Google and all its user interfaces. Around 2010 it began changing, and I've liked the changes less and less.

So is the rest of the internet.