Show HN: Gmail Classic – CSS for Reverting Gmail's New Look
github.com
github.com
It seems HN has utility after all.
But what does it mean, to shudder?
Human bodies shudder, and we typically denote body with "I" but it is a distinction between thinking self and bodily self, this shudder idea, because we typically don't use things such as "I was shuddering all night x" that's just weird and would make someone think you experienced a seizing episode. Not sure how this made it into English. In unrelated matters of similar linguistic domain, the Japanese have an expression "made my stomach stand" which is an expression to indicate "anger arose" ... not sure how that came to be either!
It would seem you are way over due as far as reading Frank Herbert’s Dune-series goes.
> I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
The done button is the archive button in normal Gmail, and I think the new Gmail has the magical categories, although I don't use them.
If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.
True, but the point of Inbox was to treat your email like a todo list. By definition, it is the same, but training millions of Inbox users that this is new behavior makes it hard to grok.
> If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.
Every Inbox is probably using bundles whether they remember or not. It becomes incredibly powerful when you have a trip coming up and your flight, hotel, rental car, etc. is all bundled up together.
(Unless of course I'm missing something, in which case I hope someone here corrects me.)
Now in Gmail, as far as I'm aware, I'd have to email that reminder to myself, and then snooze that email until the end of my workday.
Is there a way to migrate all your email and maintain your Gmail address indefinitely?
imapsync homepage: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
imapsync github gmail faq: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync/blob/master/FAQ.d/FAQ.G...
Oh and you can set gmail to forward everything to your Fastmail. You can even have it land in a separate folder to keep it all neat.
Lately I've had issues sending from my gmail account on Fastmail, I think google changed their security practices a while ago..
Searching for anything specific is becoming tedious.
It’s really a joy to use.
Observations I can make:
• For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow, but once it’s running there should be no performance issues. The app should never crash; what you describe sounds like it could be running out of memory, which would surprise me, because FastMail’s memory usage is habitually excellent (on Firefox on desktop, I tend to find a long-running FastMail session to use about 11MB only).
• If you have very large emails, the current interface renders them completely, which can be slow; in our upcoming JMAP-based interface, which we’ll be transitioning everyone over to in the near future, we truncate at 100KB by default, which I’ve definitely observed having a positive effect on performance on certain types of inordinately large (like 6MB cron job logs) or unreasonably-written emails (HTML for email is awful; if anyone ever asks you to craft an HTML email, run away).
• I know of no bugs in undo handling. If you know otherwise, please advise so that we can investigate and fix it.
I'm a happy FastMail user with two separate accounts (one personal and one for business). With the latter, I run into a following issue: there's no proper way to specify a tax ID number, in order to get an invoice that's valid in my country. I run that by your support last month, they generated me a new invoice manually (this one had boxes instead of non-ASCII characters, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but it seems I'll have to resubmit a ticket each month to get the invoice. Is there something both me & the support team is missing? Is there a chance for a "tax ID" field in billing info UI?
I need the same number for VAT and income tax, so solving the former would help me with the latter as well.
PLEASE fix this! "Startup" is basically "any time I click an e-mail notification". Having to wait 5-10 seconds to see the end of a one-sentence e-mail is incredibly frustrating! Every time I recommend FastMail to a friend I have to qualify it with a "but" because of this.
That said, I love the responsiveness of the web app. I wish all websites were that responsive. It is the reason I'm a customer of probably 5 years now. Keep up the good work!
When we start using service workers, we’ll be able to load without any network round-trips, a quick measurement of which suggests about four seconds saved for me in Australia (high latency, remember—for people in the US, the saving will be closer to a second and a half), so the nine seconds is hopefully then down to about five, five that we can subsequently work on optimising more aggressively, once the biggest obstruction (the network) is removed.
But all of this will take time to make happen. In the mean time, thanks for recommending FastMail to people with the caveat: I agree wholeheartedly with you on it!
1. Items will randomly not open and I need to force refresh the page to open a particular email.
2. Search sometimes returns 0 results and clicking on search again seems to work.
https://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/09/helvetimail-a-minimalist-...
Edit: found the original CSS on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110817055720/http://www.josefr...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140521210452/http://www.josefr...
Sadly, it doesn't work. The CSS used for the simple Gmail is remarkably minimal to a fault for folks like us.
edit: here's an extremely basic Dracula theme you can use with Stylish. As a disclaimer, this is roughly ten minutes worth of work -- I don't doubt that I missed the other 80%.
https://pastebin.com/raw/srPD5E5Z and literally the invert of that https://pastebin.com/raw/enmLB3Wz
It's definitely not pretty, but with a little time it wouldn't be too difficult to spruce it up.
Its still not perfect, but it does show potential for better themes for the basic HTML.
Its really really fast.
I'm using it all the time now, and only dropping back into 'standard' mode if I need to do fancy formatting - which is rare
If the application has an API (like Reddit) you could write your own or use a better client. I could say that about Gmail/IMAP but their IMAP implementation is shitty and broken.
I moved entirely off gmail to self hosted in 2012 and I'm glad I did so I don't have to deal with their interface. When I need webmail, I've got roundcube and it's still nice and fast.
Gmail's IMAP implementation implements three RFCs I wrote; I haven't noticed anything wrong in those areas. Are my RFCs unusual or am I overlooking something?
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches; it must have been a nasty choice to make.
A sibling comment has already mentioned the folder/flags mixup issue, but while it sounds like one small feature, that one thing is so fundamentally broken that I really can't see how any user of Gmail IMAP would overlook it.
I get duplicate notifications for the same mail in INBOX and [Gmail]/All Mail and actions on one copy don't affect the other unless clients implement Gmail-specific hacks (which many/most do).
What RFCs are you referring to?
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=40279...
The gp was talking about RFCs and the IMAP protocol implementation itself, so I was talking about the Gmail server at the protocol level, rather than user interface.
In addition, many Gmail features, especially security-related features, don't work with Mail.app.
That is absolutely a problem I've had with Mail and Gmail. No idea how I fixed it. Or whether it's been fixed at all. But for some reason, drafts turned up in searches, which made searching through my mail an incredibly painful experience. Search is fine now, though. Maybe I turned IMAP drafts off; I really don't know.
Showing the gmail labels as flags would be legal by the protocol (and have some disadvantages), showing them as mailboxes also legal (and have some other disadvantages), so I don't count that as a bug, it's merely a situation where one has to choose disadvantages.
The duplicate notifications are different; the way IMAP is designed the server cannot know which TCP connections originate from the same client. It can guess based on IP address and some other things, and it can know something based on RFC 2971, but 2971 also says explicitly that the server shouldn't do anyhting differently based on that. Which has been discussed in one of the IETF WGs, and the consensus was that the server isn't permitted to suppress probably superfluous notifications. If a client opens two connections, getting rid of duplicate notifications is the client's job.
www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?author=gulbrandsen are my RFCs; I actually wrote most of those and gmail implements four of the IMAP-related ones I've written.
There's no line in the IMAP spec. that very explicitly states "each mail MUST exist in exactly one folder", so you can certainly argue that Gmail technically follows the spec. but the only reason that line doesn't exist is because doing otherwise is so non-sensical as to not have been considered as a possibility. It does for example contain the following line, which Gmail does not follow: "permits manipulation of mailboxes (remote message folders) in a way that is functionally equivalent to local folders", but the fact that line is simply in the abstract and contains no MUST means one can argue it's not prescriptive.
There may be disadvantages to using flags instead of mailboxes, but equating their disadvantages is reverse hyperbole. If there was any equivalence, you wouldn't have every major client containing a rake of Gmail-specific code to work around the issue.
I don't want to argue about the disadvantages of flags vs. mailboxes. It's a valid subject but I don't want a subject change.
Sent emails for one.
I’ve written various email integration components and have to make special safe-guards for Gmail-specific crap.
A company bought Winamp and is supporting/developing it again. A version supporting Windows 10 "leaked" just a few weeks ago.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/winamp-returns-in-2019-to-...
For email, I run my own server and I like Heirloom-mailx as the user program (I find it much better than Outlook), although you can also use others if you like to do.
I believe the words you are looking for are “embrace” and “extend”.
And with undo and DRM in latest Gmail, we might as well add “extinguish”.
I'm deeply skeptical of the cloud. The whole point seems to be to get us to rent the things we used to own. And if we're not paying the rental fees out of our wallet, then we're paying with our personal data instead.
You almost get the feeling that something is broken when you load Gmail at this point. The Gmail interface is... fine I suppose, but I'd much prefer a native client. Sadly the best you can hope for these days is Apple Mail, and that's also just "fine".
Ever tried Mailmate?
I have gigabit internet and I can assure you it's not a bandwidth problem.
I do work for Google as a web engineer, but not on Gmail and have no insider insight on gmail speed.
Also, Guest & Incognito seem to be intrinsically faster for some reason even compared to an entirely fresh profile, so you may want to compare against an empty profile instead.
In the end I just setup email in the Mac email client.
This was in the latest Firefox, and I know chrome is supposed to perform better for gmail, but writing an email on a 3 year old laptop shouldn’t be a big issue, but here we are.
You can press Command+Shift+R to force reload and it works fine afterwards.
Also, running GMail in Firefox (on MBP) makes Firefox consume 100% of a single CPU core very often. But if I open developer tools to track down the source of the problem, it stops consuming 100%.
Well, at least they stop me from checking e-mail too often. I used to check e-mail like 5-6 times per hour before. Now I do it 2-3 times per day and I feel like it increased my productivity on stuff that actually matters. So, it isn't all that bad ;)
According to https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en, the following link should set it to basic html mode (I haven't tested it) https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui
I've used the basic html mode before when the normal (js heavy) one was a bit slow, and it ended up being much faster even if every action requires a whole new page request/render.
Today I'm struggling with 8 GiB of RAM and 2 cores. Admittedly I have many tabs open, but that is to be expected. Web site creators might believe that the world revolves around their web site, but really it does not, and so they must share my machine.
Weaker systems are of course unusable. Suppose the hardware is a 32-bit PowerPC Mac with one core and 512 MiB of RAM, and there are a bunch of tabs open to similarly taxing web sites or worse. I've mostly had to retire a system like this, which makes me really annoyed because it is quiet due to being fanless.
Note that the "weaker system" described above is not really weak. Long ago, I used the old gmail just fine with far less. There was a time when 32 MiB of RAM was enough to open several browser windows (we didn't have tabs) and run them. JIT didn't even exist yet, but the web ran fine.
It's the usual problem I think: software developers are rewarded with high-end developer workstations to keep them happy and productive, and then they test the software all by itself on this high-end hardware and everything looks good. Nobody is testing on older low-end hardware with lots of other things running in the background.
Gmail will completely freeze for ~10-15 seconds while performing a search.
There's a fair bit of obscure CSS here; how long has it been working for? I would guess the autogenerated class names change from time to time.
I've been plugging at this set of CSS for about a month now. And you'd think the classNames would change, but they're nearly identical to the old. Very few changes between the old look and the new. Speculating, I'd say that Google killed the old, classic theme so they didn't have to maintain CSS for new features.
Edit: I went ahead and made one, did a quick test by loading it unpacked, seems to work. https://github.com/tyingq/gmail-classic All yours if you want it.
I loved the "Original Classic". Every update since has worsened the look & feel.
When Steve Jobs passed away, the whole software industry took a gigantic step backwards in design. There are lots of great designers in the world (have a look at https://dribbble.com/ ) but the people who hire designers often can't tell a great designer from a mediocre one, and that's how we end up with the not-so-great design of the current generation of software, including those from Google and even Apple.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...
The human mind is built to build models... We are constantly building models of the world and predicting how that world will work. When you have a digital world that has no rules where every time you do something it behaves in a new and different way it's surprising... and it is also really stressful. Your mind can't build any models. That makes it hard. Everything is an adventure. But when you are trying to get something done you don't want an adventure, right? We want things to behave in a predictable way. It'd be like, sometimes I put something on the table it doesn't sit there, it flies up to the ceiling.
Skeuomorphic design helps users make mental models. The above paragraph is actually a from Google talk on Material Design! They understood the theory well, but their implementation is lacking.
I find bauhaus design and understanding affordances etc much more interesting than abstract and non functional design.
As another note, usability testing with irregular computer users with a skeuomorphic design vs a "flat UI" produces such crazy results in favour of skeuomorphism.
But you're totally right -- the use of color to clearly separate areas instead of white everywhere? Buttons with clear text instead of inscrutable gray icons? "Compact" lists that show your info instead of a whitespace fetishization?
I miss the old days...
Amusingly, it is way smoother in Firefox. Related, can paste large amounts of data in sheets with Firefox, but Chrome grinds and hits some O(n^2) type of issue after so many rows.
BUT IT'S SO SLOW
When I want to compose, I look for a normal button in a normal place. I can't get used to a red button. My mind filters it out, like an ad. I pretty much don't see it. Every time, there is a sort of disoriented and bewildered search to find a compose button.
Was it supposed to have the opposite effect?
Given GMail's mix of users, a subset of whom are probably power users that are open to 'discoverable' features, would it not be sensible for GMail to allow an option, an option that a vocal minority of power users do seemingly want, to be selected and allow these users to retain these features they were used to. Adding 3rd party hacks doesn't seem optimal.
A/B testing is like voting: It results in dissatisfaction for an often large proportion of those affected. Using techniques like multivoting that don't result in a single answer for everyone just seems like a better idea given these audiences are sufficiently large enough to support.
Bug? Or opinion by Google?
Some screenshots in the reader would be nice.
the only way to signal to google that they are making the wrong choice is to stop using the web UI, not to skin it. eg with the recent Chrome signin gaffe lots of people switched to FF and google had to react.
If there were no options I’d be more generous but there are plenty of mail clients one can switch to. plenty.
It is working fine for me on Firefox 63.0.3 (64-bit) using ViewImage 2.1
(Myself don't even know there will be a new UI either.)
Logged in on Firefox though I’m not seeing the new design . Not sure if that helps anyone having trouble with the extension.
Naming might be a problem, however. Companies get litigious when you use their trademarks/brand, even when modifying things on the client side.
Slack came after an HN user for using "Slack" in their GitHub repo that hosted a client-side script for Slack.
If the storage, searching and tagging of mail are all handled by the backend, building the web frontend seems like it could be 'hobby project' sized.