Google Mail is quite fast for me as well... And I'm not even using some crazy fast computer, just old PC with Core i5.
On a dual core cpu from 2014 with an ssd running linux I opened first firefox 70 and then chrome 75.
In both cases I was logged into my google account. In both cases I opened and then closed gmail to ensure what could be cached was cached.
In each I then entered mail.google.com and measured the time between hitting enter and seeing what looked like a usable interface. Lets compare that to other local ways of accessing email.
Running mu find maildir:/Gmail/INBOX took 9 ms this is easy to measure as it happens in the terminal.
Creating an emacsclient frame takes about 150ms added to the mu query which takes about 9. Logically there is some time required to render the view but its quite small and challenging to measure so lets say aprox 200ms or 1/5th of a second.
Loading the old school plain interface html interface to gmail took aprox 1.5 seconds.
It took 10 seconds in either browser to load the "modern" javascript gmail view.
For reference this is about 7 times slower than the html view or 50 times slower than mu4e.
Reading
https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...
> A response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous. Response times of 1 second or less are fast enough for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information. Response times greater than 10 seconds completely lose the user’s attention.
This is why the slow loading Gmail interface has a loading screen so it is perceptibly doing something rather than appearing to be frozen. After this the interface is fast enough in the context of web apps wherein the user expects a small delay between actions but not as quick as a desktop app which can trivially be perceptibly instant.
Interestingly the old interface despite using vastly less ram and loading much much quicker initially appears to say load a message slightly slower than the slower loading interface so the optimum web interface would appear to be the slower loading more sophisticated interface if you don't mind keeping that browser tab pinned and always running.
A desktop app is still on the overall the superior option.
Is your gmail experience objectively different?
I don't know how could you expect ms-time response. I have 70ms ping to mail.google.com. It's just not possible for a web app to 9ms time response, unless you're living at data center. But as a web app, Gmail is amazing and pretty fast. I don't know why it's slow for other people, I'm not Google engineer and I don't have performance insights. I just telling that it's far from slow for me. Definitely not 10 seconds.
It's slow for others because a huge range of machines exist and tons have slower cpu, storage, or especially network.
Worldwide the majority is probably using worse machines especially in poorer countries than ours.
If you want to see fast mail, go load the basic html version of Gmail. I have it bookmarked because it loads as fast as you think it should.
Regular google mail loads so painfully slow in comparison, they needed a splash screen.
with possibly 8 gigs of RAM?
Thats still WAY faster than most machines being used in the wild.
Sorry, your SV bubble is showing.