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Comment by papruapap | Hacker News Reader

Old stuff stills need to be maintained and sometimes old stuff starts requiring the new stuff to work as before. Not to mention maintaining old CI/CD pipelines and Google custom builders.

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It's not as if Google is exactly hurting for profit, build time, or engineers trained in checks notes basic HTML forms. This is a "fuck you" to folks on low-powered devices, low-bandwidth connections, and anyone else not generally monetizable through their horrendously slow bloatware UI and product tie-ins therein.

Which low end devices can’t run the current version of the mobile gmail site? Who isn’t able to run it?

The smartphone penetration rate in sub-Saharan counties has doubled between 2013 and 2017. Countries like Ghana and Senegal had about 30% usage in 2017, and South Africa was over 50%.

And 2017 was 6 years ago, so we’re probably at the point where the majority of people in some of the least developed countries on earth are using smartphones that can run a lightweight mobile site with some JavaScript like gmail.

At least half of Africa has LTE connectivity, while over 75% has 3G.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/10/09/majorities-in-...

https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/blog/mobile-connec...

I live in a rich country and can afford a smartphone but I don't want a site that needs JavaScript to work. I don't want 4G or 5G or above to be mandatory to work well. Because this is completely at odds with what we should be doing environmentally wise: keep existing devices as long as possible without needing to buy new ones, and just use less energy overall. Don't change a website because it feels old, because that's energy that could be used elsewhere. Don't require heavy interactivity. Don't require Yet Another network.

You don’t want to have 4G? Hate to break it to you, in the US 3G has already been shut off. There is only 4G/5G.

The same will follow for all other countries. LTE is more cost effective and better for cellular carriers and users.

This idea from the hardcore tech Luddite community that the web has died the moment we have to run a line of JavaScript is completely ridiculous. My computer from 1999 could run JavaScript in the browser. It’s time to get over it.

Plus, email has an alternative with mail clients, which are a better experience for users with poor data connectivity, anyway.

Not OP, but I don't think the point is 3G vs 4G. I think (and hold the same ideal myself) that requirements should be kept as low as feasible. HTML gMail is there, it works, it's unlikely its maintenance would break the bank for Google - so why kill it?

We will be pushed to 4G sooner or later, but lower requirements helps at any major events with lots of traffic on cell towers, or a slow, spotty, over-subscribed wifi connection at an airport or hotel. It helps when your main device breaks, but you don't want one app with high memory requirements to kill everything else on your (old) backup.

Here’s my guess: nobody’s actually using the HTML gmail anymore because device and network capability has improved tenfold or more globally in the last decade or so. The amount of people who moved from feature phones to smartphones is basically everyone.

Slow and spotty connections are a nostalgic memory for most people, and even if they’re not, Google provides low bandwidth alternatives via their app and third party mail clients.

It’s fine that this service doesn’t cost much money to run but if nobody’s using it there’s no point.

It's not that I don't want 4G, it's that I don't want to need 4G. Yes, 4G is more efficient for the same amount of data... but Jevons is fully active and we are consuming way more data in 4G than in 3G to the point that we are just using more and more equipment, devices, services, ...

I am proud to call myself a luddite, because contrary to popular knowledge luddites (and neo-luddites) are not technophobic but technocritics: they question whether a technological progress is also a social progress, a human progress, an environmental progress. There is little reason to believe that 4G and 5G are such.

If your computer from 1999 can run current websites, why change websites ?

If you’re really a Luddite you’d just use POP for email access, which predates HTML and is offered by gmail. Isn’t static HTML too heavy for your slow connection?

If your computer from 1990 can download emails with POP, why change to HTML?

is Basic HTML Gmail free of JS? I had to use it recently I remember typing in the to/from fields and there were autocomplete pop-ups.

There is javascript and javascript, it's all about the proper amount of complexity. Just like HN that does have JS but only a tiny amount, not necessary for working, and can still work without.

I don't know how gmail works, my comment is more general. I want more HN-like and less Medium-like

I live in a major German city and I had until last month a limited mobile data contract. Once I ran out of data, I was downgraded to a slower speed. The way it apparently works is that, instead of delivering (say) 17Kb per second, they would deliver 1Mb at high speed and then nothing for the remaining 59 seconds. Almost every AJAX website would time out, with HN and i.reddit.com (RIP) being some of the few websites that would still work under these conditions. The classic GMail has a 50/50 chance of loading, but if it loads then it stays loaded.

I'm from South America and I've been to touristic places with real bad internet. People living there definitely feel these kind of choices.

But you don’t have that legacy plan anymore, do you? So now you don’t have this problem.

Even if you still had this problem you would have an email client or Gmail app as an alternative, both options that can function offline and in spotty connections.

I would guess this service is being deprecated because nobody is using it.

You seem hellbent convinced that bad connections don't matter if you can't personally see them. Consider that if you're here in a community full of some of the geekiest people to ever roam the planet and you have a wave of people telling you there's a problem, that there's probably hundreds of thousands of folks suffering in silence that you'll never hear from - maybe because their connection is throttled or high-ping or some other calamity.

POP predates HTML so I’m not even sure why this is a big deal considering that Google kept the lightest and oldest possible method of email access available.

My laptop is over 10 years old and crawls on "modern" Gmail. There are probably lots of people in my situation, but without the means to upgrade or the knowhow to set up a native client.

In what universe is setting up an email client hard? You literally just open the mail app on windows or Mac and they both have a big gmail logo that you click on.

In my universe, unfortunately, people don't do that. So if their web client becomes too slow, they buy a new computer.

That is bad for the sustainability of life in my universe :-).

I'll speak from personal experience sailing around some not-even-THAT-remote places this year when I say: shitty network connections still exist. Rampantly. Even in the US and Canada. Hop on a Starlink dish or even just a cell phone tether somewhere in rural Nevada or at sea in British Columbia some time. Heck, hop on hotel wifi in Juneau Alaska (the capital of that state, no less) - that terrestrial connection in 2021 was so bad that I had lag SSHing to my home server to run mutt and vim. The modern internet was completely inaccessible: attempting to post a picture to Mastodon would just time out.

These are the usecases Google is declaring are not worth accessing their services anymore.

But Google offers a lower bandwidth alternative that predates HTML (POP).

I’m sorry your internet was slow on your sailboat :’( maybe a glass of your favorite vintage would help?

Is there supposed to be some sort of "bougie" implication here? Because my sailboat was anything but - and indeed, most folks who live on sailboats full time (I no longer do, but I did) are riding around in quite modest vessels.

The point isn't "oh use another protocol". Gmail is billed as a full-on product, and especially, they push their web interface. This is them abandoning users. Sure, some folks will fall back to IMAP or POP. But at the end of the day, the company is taking a stance, much as you're taking a stance and I'm taking a stance and all opinionated actions are stances being taken that reflect our characters and values.

It's not only that. It's also that by always considering normal to use dramatically heavier stuff, we force everybody to update their hardware and to use more bandwidth. And why? Just because marketing people like to send images and track users over e-mail?

We talk a lot about energy nowadays. I think there is a point in systematically questioning the new technology if it requires orders of magnitudes more resources. Do you need to send a 4K video with a moving "hello" text, or is it totally enough to send 5 letters? The video is a lot heavier, for no actual need.

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