Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fredej | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how Google has been banging on about "just a few milliseconds of extra loadtime and your bounce-rate increases!" while in Gmail it's like they think the product is so good, people should be willing to wait 10 seconds to view their _mail_.

The reason I'm even reading this comment section is because I wanted something to do while waiting for Gmail to load.

View on HN

But the reason Gmail is so slow isn't because they've made it a SPA. It's because they made it a shitty SPA. They use nonstandard web technologies that work like ass. It was also a SPA before the new redesign and it worked pretty well.

If Gmail is taking 10 seconds to load it might be worth your time to consider a faster computer for your own sake. It can be like 3-4 seconds on a faster computer.

Nah, just tested and mail.google.com took 23.3 seconds to load in Chrome and 30.2 seconds in Firefox. I have a 4-core 8-thread i7 and am on a 20Mbps internet line. It's the website, it isn't my computer.

Is that from scratch? I'm using an i3 on a 1 Mbps satellite connection, and opening up Gmail now (having opened it earlier today), it was 0.27s until DOMContentLoaded and I could interact with it. It continued asynchronously loading stuff in the background but from my POV it loaded in 1/3 of a second, which in Chrome is faster than the app opens on my iPhone 7. I have disabled the Hangouts/Chat feature in settings which apparently makes a big difference.

Okay I can't believe that either! You're really talking about full Gmail loading in 1/3 of a second? That sounds impossible if we're loading the same Gmail...

Yeah, it's pretty crazy that there would be such a huge difference. Turning off Hangouts and using uBlock Origin might make a big difference because that's all I've really done to modify it.

Would you mind measuring how long it takes on a vanilla browser (e.g. guest mode of Chrome) without anything being turned off?

Can you try in Guest Mode (or Incognito but only if you've disabled extensions in it)? I'm guessing you either have (1) battery power or other cause of downclocking, (2) slow extensions, (3) disabled/small cache, (4) an old CPU (old gen i7 maybe?), or (5) a large distance between you and the server. I have a similar machine to yours that's 3+ GHz and it's consistently loading in less than 4 seconds when I'm on AC.

(To be clear, I'm not excusing how slow their code is, just trying to help you save some time in the long run.)

Takes 2.5 seconds with Chrome on my Quad Core i7 (laptop)

Takes 2 seconds for me on a 2018 MBP

Reply on news.ycombinator.com