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Comment by slovenlyrobot | Hacker News Reader

I switched back to Thunderbird sometime in late 2017, in part because I was working from abroad with spotty Internet at the time. Since coming home, it's stuck. The experience is so much better than waiting for a Gmail tab to "boot up".

I still nip into Gmail quite regularly, especially when I'm already in the browser or a tab is already open, but if I'm sitting at the desktop and need to compose an e-mail, at some point the default returned to alt-tabbing to Thunderbird.

No waiting around, no messing, blank e-mail window up on the screen as fast as I can hit CTRL+N.

Back when everyone switched to Gmail circa 2005ish, hitting CTRL+N quite probably meant a firestorm of random IO hitting a magnetic disk, on a machine with barely any RAM for cache. The equation has long since changed, and your reason to use Gmail might now be your reason to use a desktop client. Highly recommend giving it a shot

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You can use the HTML-only version of Gmail at the bottom of the page which loads in 300 ms or so.

    Gmail view: standard | >basic HTML<

I find it embarrassing that this feature needs to exist at all

Gmail is a free product, hence it has possibly low priority.

I am paying for it, as are many businesses.

Some % of Google's $30 billion quarterly revenue comes from Ads in Gmail. This does not include revenue generated from enterprise G Suite licenses.

My tuition pays for g suite.

It’s free for colleges. Your tuition pays for bloated administrative staff salaries.

The older versions were faster. Every new update becomes slower and more bloated.

The HTML version doesn't update when you get a new email. You have to refresh it to check. Also if you want to compose more than one email at once, or if you want to refer to one email while composing another, you need multiple browser tabs.

> The HTML version doesn't update when you get a new email. You have to refresh it to check.

This is one of the reasons I use it. I get in, catch up, get the hell out of dodge (close the tab), and then I don't have (yet) a(nother) gmail tab sucking up literally hundreds of MB of RSS.

Such features could be added in a lightweight way with very minimal javascript, to the html version.

It looks like keyboard shortcuts don't work here? I tried the new Thunderbird, but it looks like you (still) need an extension to change keyboard shortcuts and none of them work with v68 even if you don't mind third party extensions.

For anyone interested, I just put together a userscript with some rudimentary key assignments for the Basic HTML version of Gmail:

https://pastebin.com/raw/zyfHp5Vs

http://tiny.cc/ggmm loads gmail fast

This seems longer than writing http://gmail.com or does it link directly to the html version

seems like it links directly. dunno why you'd go through a link shortener instead of bookmarking the actual page tho.

Perhaps due to preferences against bookmarking the customized url you get on that page? The shortest canonical URL I know to access html version directly is

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h

Don't forget html google contacts and html google calendar. Not optimized for desktop, but damn they are fast. The calendar also still parses natural language for new meetings using the bar, whereas regular google calendar dropped it from the looks of things.

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/m?pli=1

I never left Thunderbird. I never really got in what way gmail on browser was better.

They popularized tags instead of folders. Tags I get - I can toss emails into "todo" + "personal" + etc and remove it from other views, without deleting it, and without using up more space. Many local apps still struggle to support this smoothly, though it's gradually improving. Same goes for server-side support, e.g. on Fastmail a duplicate in another folder costs duplicated storage.

Other than that, dunno. Desktop email clients have basically always been faster to use IMO, and setup has been borderline trivial ever since imap/smtp discovery strategies became common.

Also Thunderbird and Enigmail/PGP etc had been fairly solid for a long time.

Moving a message in a folder in Thunderbird makes a duplicate?

No, but you're moving it. Can you have the same message in three folders?

Ok I see what you mean, thanks

Most Thunderbird / desktop tag implementations are done by just copying the message to multiple folders (which achieves nearly identical behavior, which is great. It's just not usually optimized UX). And most servers don't deduplicate messages globally (I'm not sure why, tbh. probably there's some rational-but-depressing reason).

> Many local apps still struggle to support this smoothly

Makes sense as the protocol they use to talk to the server doesn’t support tags.

I can read email at home, at work, on my phone, on my tablet, on any other device that I can access.

My hard disk crashes? No problem, everything is in the "cloud". My computer crashes? I buy a new one and am up and running in no time without installing too much.

As can I using IMAP. None of my mail is stored on my local disk (and hasn't been since 1995).

Yes. You can always access webmail anyway.

One Thunderbird extension I miss is FireTray that let me minimize it to Tray. Number of new emails would show on the icon, so you never missed an email without it also getting in the way of my other work while alt-tabbing.

Birdtray extension (https://github.com/gyunaev/birdtray) does that work quite well, I'm so happy with it. It also lets you keep Thunderbird as a background process.

Thanks. This will make my life so much better - or return it to how good it was before.

Webmail could work great offline if we could store more then 5MB on the client.

IndexedDB should be a solution to this, but it's not as widely supported as localStorage.

96.5% vs 97.5%, doesn't seem to be the holdback any longer.

Could also use service worker to prime the cache. And generate static pages for each e-mail/thread.

New mail could be pushed using web push.

The problem is the outbox, how to send sent mail once user go online !?

> if we could store more then 5MB on the client.

I recently stopped using Slack because their web client started storing 600MB in local storage. If gmail did that too, it would be the last nail in the coffin. I absolutely do not want random (or not-random) websites using my computer to store their data.

It doesn't have to be "let every site store 600 MB or none can store more than 5 MB". Seems like a great thing for a permission really.

Not just a permission but a limit too. If I could set the limit to something reasonable, like 1MB, that'd be fine.

Obligatory comment that Gmail has a basic HTML view that is substantially faster and less resource intensive, but not as pleasant to use:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

It loads almost instantly for me, and is quite quick to navigate.

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