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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails takes 2.5 seconds.

I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.

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They hire a lot of coders. And coders gonna write code and stick it in there?

It's that slow because there's just so much JavaScript going on.

Indeed, but that's an engineering failure. I even think that Gmail makes sense an SPA. It should be JavaScript. They've just overcomplicated their implementation.

I miss the old, snappy interface, and held out for the longest time until they forced G Suite users to move over some time in 2019.

I heard that GMap is also getting slow, and so is Chrome (although I don't use them personally). I'm curious how the company's culture has shifted over year. Or maybe it hasn't shifted, and there's always a push for feature creep. I don't know. It'd be interesting to hear someone who know how this could happen.

> and so is Chrome

Yeah, I'm shocked how much slower Chrome is than Firefox here in 2020. Never expected this.

For me gmail loads and becomes interactive in under 2 seconds on an empty cache. I did not expect it to be that slow for other people.

That said I do practice inbox zero, so it might just be spending time on loading a lot of mail?

Load times seem very variable. Loading any label (from 10s to 10,000s of emails) is <1 sec for me.

I use the basic HTML version, which is much faster. You can change your default here:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049

Maybe people have more emails in their accounts. That would explain it partially.

yeah you just reminded me that gmail is the new old hotmail

seduction makes everyone do its best, over time you rot

time for a new challenger ?

It actually is. It has some tweaks done so that no matter what device you on it still runs most functionality.

That's absolutely standard for a webapp though (and really old devices are only supported through the "Basic HTML" view). There's no reason why wide device support should cause it to be slow.

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