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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

Used to love google, for many many years. Slowly starting to despise them, though.

It's different for everyone, but for me it started with this gmail redesign that made the product so slow it's almost worthless to me. And worst of all is I feel like there isn't even a good competing service to switch to.

And now Chrome...

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I think for most people, their image of Google was formed when gmail was released. Most mail providers offered mailboxes 10MB in size and Google upends all of that offering "free" mailboxes 1000MB. Respect for their command of technology formed with every product.

Then people started to realize Google only introduces products that collect data in a new way from its other products. If it can't survive that test then it doesn't exist. Ugh.

I blame the CEO. Is it a coincidence that all the best Google products peaked in 2012-2016?

They literally removed the don't be evil motto as the reason for their conduct.

People will say that they still have, but that's just a stupid line at the end. They used to have a whole preface dedicated to it and have the code of conduct based around it.

I switched to protonmail a few months back, and have been very happy with the service. They focus on privacy and security as a core value. They have a limited free account (limited in terms of storage space and message volume), so not a direct replacement for gmail. I use the paid service for more storage and a custom domain.

Yes, love it. The paid service is $5/m and you can use a custom domain and create 5 email aliases. Also, I think, ProtonVPN comes with that package (not using that yet, but will)

The comments in the linked thread don't really go into why this change was made, but I think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt that the proposal was made in an effort to improve other aspects of the browser (speed or maintainability, for example)

No sane person should give Google the benefit of the doubt, triply so when it comes to ads and ad-blocking.

Indeed. A company worth $0.8 trillion dollars does not need Internet commenters to defend or make excuses for it.

What are your HW specs? Gmail is fast as ever for me, the UI works just fine on both Mac and PC.

Quad core, sixteen gigs of RAM, and it takes several seconds of "Loading" to delete an email. It's comical. If you're using Chrome you might not have the issue, Google uses a lot of proprietary Chrome only tricks to make their websites even borderline usable.

Bingo.

Funny you say that. The gmail redesign is absolutely dysfunctional in Firefox and had me searching for desktop email clients.

I switched back to Thunderbird and have been content ever since. IMAP works fine.

Are you using GMail, or have you found another email host too?

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