The original gmail design was so fast, beautiful and minimalistic. It had vi key bindings and was close to perfect.
The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar!
Wtf?!
The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar!
Wtf?!
The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible.
Send plain HTML, then make JS take over after loading like most modern frameworks can do.
.. yes i really have to ditch Google ..
On a sidenote YT has also become a dystopian addiction machine - years ago you could easily curate what you saw, feeds, channels etc, now everything is controlled by the "google god skinner box algo" just like i feel Gmail is headed towards with all kinds of automated tools.
They did the same thing for GC UI. They think it tricks the user into thinking it's fast, instead of making it fast.
As design overall started to become more relevant in products Google started to push out their redesigns but it was done with form instead of function as the focus. They've never really re-designed anything to be better - their updates have usually made the product worse.
But without a strong design leader it's death by a thousand cuts because there are so many layers of management to getting anything done.
Example: load the basic HTML and enter a thread then return to the thread list. Returning to the thread list takes about 1 second. In the full gmail return to thread list takes no remote time, only local event handler CPU time, it's almost instantaneous.
Example 2: Open a thread in the basic UI and use "newer" or "older" to navigate to other threads. Every click takes ~1s. In the full Gmail UI navigate to adjacent thread takes almost no time, because the app pre-loads these threads in anticipation of you visiting them.
TL;DR the basic HTML gmail is good if your device is severely resource-poor and you just need to see if you have mail. For every other purpose it's worse.
Boggles the mind how Google web apps have performance issues like this.
I didn't know there was some kind of secret mobile Web version of Gmail - I get a blank white page when I open your link on mobile tho (using Brave)?
I thought it was a broken page at first.
Google made a superior replacement to the current gmail experience and then just threw it away like it never existed.
I enabled that a while back which makes navigating emails much more pleasant