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> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop

Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).

Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.

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I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email providers because of 20 seconds a day.

That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.

This seems quite a common complaint, but gmail has always been pretty snappy for me. I wonder what causes the variability?

My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.

"The once a month I load it" they don't care about you, you're not the typical paying enterprise use case.

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