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Comment by wycy | Hacker News Reader

> “Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left,” rants Leggett. “C’mon. It’s pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break.”

Sure, not many desktop apps have a huge top left logo, but almost all websites do. Acting like this is a unique failing of Gmail is strange to me.

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To compare, FastMail has no such logo. Just a big giant menu button that is easy to find and click, unlike the five different tiny menu buttons, only some of which are actually menus, hidden behind obscure icons and littered about GMail's interface.

Per usual web tradition, FastMail has a logo in top left corner, which opens the menu when clicked. Source: I have it open in another tab.

Your FastMail is different than mine somehow. Mine just says "Mail" with a drop-down arrow in the upper-left corner.

Note also that, in GMail, the logo isn't a menu. It is just a link to the page you are already on. There's a hamburger menu next to it, but that just opens the sidebar.

Too late to edit, I guess there is a logo (an envelope with a swirly bit), but there is no brand name like GMail has.

Yup. That particular envelope with this particular swirly bit is their logo.

It's also 109x40 pixels (at least on my system). No exactly a huge fucking logo.

I'm not on a machine I can access Gmail from right now, so I can't say if it appears the same size on my screen. However, just for perspective, HN's logo with name is ~122x22. I like that it stays at the top of the page and can go out of view with scrolling. Gmail's logo is always in view, taking screen space.

I think his point is that we've been trying _really_ hard over the past decade to make these web apps behave as much as possible like desktop apps. So if we're going to continue to do so then we need to break with the things like the giant fucking logo in the top left.

Do they define Gmail as a website? No. Actually, they pioneered the idea of calling websites "web apps" instead.

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