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Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-powered abomination).

It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections.

It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried not being poor?

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They do still support the basic HTML version:

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

Is that really the previous design, though? I remember being presented with this button before and ended up on an extremely bare bones version of Gmail (like something built for 2G feature phone browsers) that didn't have support for changing mail settings, etc.

They seem to have disabled the option to make that the default view. Or rather, the option is still there but it doesn't do anything, always opening the bloated interface.

Hey now you can make plenty fast Angular apps, there should never be a case where you skip letters, it's all about how you use the tools available. There are dozens of barebones websites that recursively SELECT 1 row at a time from a remote database and that is just as painful.

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