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>The few people with the problem “my Excel spreadsheet is too slow” have already written enough Excel formulas that migration to any other platform is impossible. Fortunately, I have no understanding of business, and so we’re going to look at further improvements anyway.

That's how you know you're reading a really solid tech piece and not some blogspam!

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I had this line on my clipboard, ready to paste into this comment thread:

> Fortunately, I have no understanding of business, and so we’re going to look at further improvements anyway.

That line grabbed me the same way it did you. I think of Electron chat apps, and how JIRA pages take 15 seconds to load, all the while the UI is glitching and twitching and daring you to click early[0]. And the only reason it's allowed to continue is because very large and complicated processes have been built on top of them.

[0] (What I want to know is, how do these lazy-load UIs know I'm about to click before I do? Because the buttons seem to dodge my click with uncanny timing.)

Zendesk has a horrible UI for that reason. You open the dropdown menu to choose the operation to be applied, try click "pending" and inadvertently end up pressing "solved" when the UI changes just in time. Infuriating. I've been trained to patiently wait until the flickering ends, which is such a shame in 2020.

"Until the Flickering Ends" is going to be the name of my autobiography

Most annoying thing is even gmail does this to me all the time now. Enter the recipient, then click down to subject line.. but in that two-second delay gmail suggests new contacts, just in time for me to accidentally click on them.

Not to mention the whole UI taking forever to load, with the trash button seeming to be the last icon up.

I spent a few hours migrating my email away from Gmail to Fastmail. Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address.

I you ask me why I did this, I might grumble about Google becoming too powerful, and my desire to decouple my life from them. And that's true.

But the concrete thing that pushed me over the edge was the UI getting worse and worse and worse.

I'm sure there are a dozen great web mail services out there, but Fastmail is the one I landed on and it's been fantastic. But the moral of the story is that I might have stayed with "evil Google" longer if they also didn't screw up the UX.

What’s wrong with labels and tabs and important and starred and blah blah blah?

I'm in the middle of doing exactly this right now. I'm at the point where I have set up email forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail, but not switched any service accounts over to my new address. Even just this quarter-measure has improved the UX of email for me by roughly 573%

It's not strictly the web interface that is better/faster/etc either. I get notifications from the Fastmail app for forwarded messages ~30-60 seconds before the Gmail app knows about the original.

> Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address

This is one of the main reasons I have my own domain. When I migrated to Fastmail, I just had to tell Fastmail that I wanted it to handle mail from the domain, set the MX records at my domain's nameserver to point to Fastmail, add a TXT record there for SPF, and add some CNAME records for DKIM. Fastmail gives instructions for all that here [1].

There was no need to update any sites with my email address because my address did not change. And there will be no need to update any sites if I ever decide to move from Fastmail to some other mail service, or to go back to running my own mail server.

Even simpler, you can use Fastmail as your DNS provider. Then it is just a matter of registering a domain, and telling your registrar that Fastmail is your DNS provider. Fastmail takes care of setting up the mail-related DNS records then. Here are there instructions for this approach [2].

The only serious things I use addresses that aren't @mydomain for are things that I might need to receive email from in order to resolve problems with @mydomain.

I strongly recommend this approach.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-mxonly.h...

[2] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-nsmx.htm...

I have my own domain and email host, but still ship it through Gmail because I like it. At least I know that I'm not tied to Gmail.

What's wrong with the UX? I haven't used anything else in a while.

I haven't used Gmail for a couple years now, but when I decided to leave, it was slow. Loading the page took awhile, sifting through emails felt sluggish, etc.

Nothing like JIRA or other really slow sites, but just enough to be noticeable and annoying. Like I could "feel" the JS-heavy frontend doing more than it needs to in order to display a list of emails, or show a single one. Meanwhile it's nagging me on the left to add contacts to my GTalk, or Hangouts, or whatever they keep renaming that thing to.

The whole tabbed inbox thing didn't really help me. There are some "promotional" emails that I want to see in my main inbox, but most I don't. But with the tab system, I still have to check it all the time to avoid missing the ones I care about. So instead of decluttering things, I now have more places to click on to see what I have.

There was something about them disabling Exchange support a few years back. This made emails arrive much slower in my inbox on my iOS native client. I can't remember the specifics of that, or if IMAP is now functionally equivalent, but I don't care anymore.

And I just really would like to see my inbox and the currently-selected message at the same time. AFAIK, you have to choose between the message list or a single message; can't see both.

-------

So, after typing all that, I just logged into it again to see if my complaints held up. It seems faster now. I discovered I can disable the tabbed inbox (probably always could). I can enable a right reading pane (probably always could), and change the theme to a dark background (again...).

I got it almost looking like my Fastmail setup. But they're 2 years too late, and the font rendering is kinda crappy on my non-HiDPI external display anyway

So I guess now the only reason I don't use Gmail anymore is because Google.

I don't suppose Fastmail has labels, does it? Labels are the one thing that's keeping me from switching from Gmail full-time.

I was going to reply "no", but I checked the settings just now and it appears it does!

This is from the settings:

    Labels
    ======
    Organize messages with:
    [ ] Folders: file each message into a single folder
    [ ] Labels: add multiple labels to each message
    Switch methods at any time. Folders will become labels and vice versa.

I don't use labels, so I don't know if it's the same as how Gmail does it. But multiple labels per message is a thing it looks like.

> just in time for me to accidentally click on them.

And somewhere a product manager earns their bonus. Engagement! KPIs! metrics! Omg people really love this feature, they keep clicking on it <3

Can you enter the subject first, then to recipient?

Alright, we’re piling onto this comment. So let me complain about clicking a Google result, immediately realizing I want the result beneath, hitting back and clicking, just in time for a “more like this” panel to drop down below the first result.

Man, Google is so frustrating to use.

It’s really not so bad. I only do this about 300 times per day.

I tried to hide it with stylus addon, but they keep changing the id.

Isn't that something they penalise other websites for?

Surely Google has to know how bad this is. Why have they not changed it? It makes no sense to me. It is so frustrating how slowly these big companies move.

The same stupid behavior is what often gets people to click ads. Surely they could load the ads at the same time as the results, but no, they make them come in just slightly later, right as you're about to click a link.

Because fixing this is not a new feature that would get the project manager a promotion. (I think that's the usual answer for the multitude of silly bugs while harebrained new "features" creep in.)

> JIRA pages take 15 seconds to load, all the while the UI is glitching and twitching

In the biz we call that "an improved user experience"

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