Gmail will no longer allow users to revert back to its old design | Hacker News Reader

Gmail will no longer allow users to revert back to its old design

techcrunch.com

22 pointsrmason11 comments

The internet has become rife with horrible redesigns that companies are holding back for years on end on forcing all of their users to move to, because on some level they must finally realize that the redesigns are regressions. There aren't even any big fashionable trends right now (like "flat") that can be used to dress up the redesigns as a "modernization" or an "update," because the new versions don't look any newer.

It's a good sign. Maybe unnecessary redesigns that remove functionality and lower information density are reaching a Perl 6 moment. Instead of force migration and destroying your product, the new designs have to compete with the old ones. If it's upsetting that this means that you're maintaining two websites at once, then ditch the new design entirely and just fix the old design (that made you successful.)

The new designs are often a result of the fact that managers can get credit for overseeing something new that becomes successful, but not for maintaining something old. So companies continually churn out useless new versions of things because of bad incentives. I've heard that Google is particularly prone to this, but I can't find the references for it.

This sort of thing also leads to TV shows with short lifespans.

(If it's a product that can be developed by one person, programmers may be involved instead of managers, but not much is like this any more.)

Worry not, fellow luddites. Basic HTML mode[1] isn't going anywhere.

[1]: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui

It really is astonishing how much faster, responsive and easier to use this is than the standard gmail.

Interesting - after the initial load it's substantially slower for me

The beauty of lightweight HTML is that loading the next page feels responsive, without any frameworks, callbacks and content updates. Wish we hadn't forgotten that.

I recently tested it, and even on a desktop browser "new" Reddit loads slower than old.reddit.com when e.g. navigating from the thread list into an individual thread – the initial page load isn't substantially faster with new Reddit, even though the server has to serve less dynamic content, and then you always spend another second or two waiting for the comments to actually load.

Whereas with old.reddit.com the initial page load might possibly be minimally slower, but end-to-end it's still noticeably faster, because everything, including the comments, loads in one go.

On an underpowered phone with mediocre JavaScript-performance it's even worse, so old.reddit.com is even more preferable (besides the fact that you're also getting around all the "are you sure you don't want to rather view this in the app" nonsense that way), even though it means having to rely on the browser's font inflation-algorithm for getting readable text instead of having a layout that's natively written to accommodate small screen sizes.

Wow, this really brings me back to the early days of GMail. What a flashback.

The title is clickbaity, as far as I can see you still can disable chat and meet in order to get rid of the left bar, which is pretty close to the old design, it makes sense that they don't want to maintain both versions and it doesn't seem like a plot to ram chat down your throat.

The title doesn't mention chat, throats, or what does or doesn't make sense, and is literally true.

Am I the only one who uses a desktop mail/calendar client?

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