> I sigh — actually sigh — whenever I have to open Photoshop
Yep, quad-core laptop with fast SSD and I dread opening it. I remember being an early adopter with an SSD and I just used to open PS to see how fast it opened. They took that feeling away.
The site takes so f*$%ing long to load you should have no problem clicking the "Slow? Try the Basic HTML version" link, maybe with 2-3 tries to figure out where it is (it's a small link). Then you should see an option to set it as your default.
Bonus: you can actually leave it open in a tab without eating three figure MB of memory and sometimes slowing down your machine doing god-knows-what in the background. Only downside is no notifications for new mail, but 1) that assumes you consider that a downside, and 2) that's what actual, native email clients are for.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
My company uses Outlook/Exchange and it also has a webapp; the website is pretty feature-rich and has a UI very similar to native Outlook, but it is blazing fast. The folks at Google are doing something very wrong to make it this slow.
Chrome 75.0.3770.142 with not extension active.
I've never used to commercial tools that their actual customers (advertisers) use, I wonder if they are more polished in terms of speed.
And then waited for it to load.
Did you have a warm cache for either? I find that Fastmail’s cold load is generally a fair bit faster than Gmail’s cold load, and Fastmail’s warm load is consistently faster than Gmail’s warm load; but Fastmail’s cold load can be slower than Gmail’s warm load.
I’m looking forward to working on service worker code loading loading and offline support in Fastmail; I expect us to get warm loading to under one second on a typical desktop machine, regardless of location (because it will require no network calls).
Either way, once the code has loaded, Fastmail is consistently snappier than Gmail. And uses far less memory (in Firefox, 10–15MB instead of >150MB). Offline mode will improve snappiness even further even if you don’t opt into actual offline sync, by virtue of persisting its data record cache. But that’s not implemented yet.
I was interested in what front-end library you guys were using so I did a bit of searching and found a twitter post about OvertureJS. I know this is kind of random, but I'd love to understand how you guys came to the decision to build a framework from scratch instead of relying on Angular/React. What kind of technical limitations did they have that you guys wished to tackle with Overture?
When you care about performance, there’s still a lot to be said for controlling the full stack.
I now have a bookmark for the non JS version.
And they are probably optimizing for First meaningful paint (FMP) over Time to interactive (TTI).
Strange for a company that is putting this out: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/u...
It's 2019, the app is built by one of the leading tech companies, I have a modern device with good connection (not the absolute best I could get, but still OK). Why does it take like 5 seconds to load GMail? I would expect it to be ~1s, considering it's built by freaking Google. I'd expect some mega-optimizations going into this thing and to be amazed that they managed to squeeze everything out of a simple mail app. I'd like to imagine myself thinking I'd never be able to build THAT thing, yet it's not the case.
And it's not just the loading part - interactions even after first load feel sluggish. If you try the HTML version, it feels more responsive even just navigating the inbox. It could be psychological, but even in that case it would suggest that they need to improve the first load to make me feel like the app is fast in general.
I (at least internally) swear any time I open Google Maps, either by accident or when I can't avoid using it. Same for Google office suite webapps, which I avoid as much as possible.
oh yeah just remember to mention this thing, let me open my mail quick, ... Gmail loading... and the whole room fills with malaise.
I treat it just like how I treat the massive phone screen sizes and lack of stick shift cars in the US auto market. Consumers just don’t care about the same things I do.
After I disabled some extensions the Lighthouse metrics improved but not dramatically.
Are you using a privacy extension that keep clearing the browser cache? Did you try in a private window? Is it still annoying on the second load?
I don't keep the tabs opened. I close gmail when done reading or responding email (I check my inbox every 2-3 hours.) I even close the browser very frequently during the day.
The mobile web version. Works really well, even on a desktop!