Google ending Basic HTML support for Gmail in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Google ending Basic HTML support for Gmail in 2024

tenfourfox.blogspot.com

81 pointspabs375 comments

Discussed a few days ago, 90 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372

I remember when Gmail came out, it used JavaScript and XHR to create an experience that was a lot faster than having to go back to the server and re-render a full page.

But these days it’s actually the basic HTML mode that feels super fast. I’m not sure if this is because network and compute have improved at different speeds, or just that the js framework is super bloated.

Either way, if you haven’t tried it I’d recommend giving it a shot.

Back then network speeds were less and latency higher. Sending a runtime to the client and reducing the network traffic thereafter was a big win back then.

Over time the network has improved, removing the benefit of the reduced network traffic.

We still pay the runtime performance impact though. Its morphed into what modern frameworks are today and the original benefit was forgotten. Execution times have only gone up.

So with faster network speeds and increased execution time - its been flipped. It's not that it feels super fast. It's that it is super fast.

Not to mention the web is almost unoptimized. Lots of very low hanging fruit. Early this year someone wrote a series of articles[1] demonstrating how much he could imnprove just by simply looking.

[1] https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem/

Very unfortunate. I know many blind people who use screen readers and basic HTML is important to them.

Curious, would Gmail’s standard interface not be top-class when it comes to accessibility compatibility?

It's certainly not top class for a slower connection or an older device.

Wouldn’t the native email clients on devices be better anyway?

What happens when these users are relegated to using a Chromebook on the job or in school?

There is `Mutt` console email, linux mainly , on windows under cygwin, alas does not deal well with HTML emails, it can be connected to Gmail anyway.

Reading HTML email is fine under mutt with w3m. What's difficult is replying to HTML emails without losing the HTML for the quoted message.

I use Mutt almost exclusively, but I still use the Gmail web interface to write emails from time to time for this very reason. If you want to send emails verbatim, you can use Mutt's bounce feature, but that can confuse the recipient since bouncing leaves the original headers in-tact, including the "Date" header which means the email might not appear at the top of the user's inbox.

Bouncing also doesn’t work with strict DKIM/DMARC verification if the sending domain differs.

It was once a thing for webmail services to have an option to integrate your various email accounts. Might there be any with a lightweight interface, that still offers this feature, and can log into Gmail? That could be another possibility if you're used to webmail.

Sure, there are many open source webmail systems which can connect to Gmail using IMAP: https://itsfoss.com/open-source-web-based-email-clients/

Hopefully someone else will make a replacement for basic HTML mode.

There are a million email clients out there. There is zero reason for people to use Gmail (the app) at all if they want this kind of functionality.

I often use basic HTML because it loads 5X faster and there's no stupid progress bar or spinning icon. I want to see e-mail, not a progress bar or splash screen. Splash screens were things of the 90s. Computers should be 100X faster now, and apps and websites should load imperceptibly fast. Basic HTML delivers on that.

I use Gmail because it intergrates with Google Calendar.

> Computers should be 100X faster now, and apps and websites should load imperceptibly fast.

That's unfortunately not how it works. Computers being 100X faster just allows apps to be 100X slower. Which in turns enables companies to add crap to be more profitable (like tracking, ads) or to make their devs more productive (by using frameworks that make them quicker at developing slower apps).

> I use Gmail because it intergrates with Google Calendar.

And by doing that, you support the model above. If you want a fast and minimal email service, you should use one. Not wish that GMail becomes one.

On that note, I use CalDAV to synchronize my Google Calendar, and it works quite well.

> Computers being 100X faster just allows apps to be 100X slower.

Or you can just use basic HTML with a custom stylesheet that makes it look more 21st century and you have a lightning-fast, sleek experience.

I'm with you there: I wish the software industry wrote good, fast software. I am just observing that it is not how it works.

Make faster hardware, and companies will build slower software. The goal of companies is just to produce as much software as possible, it doesn't have to be good (software is mostly pretty bad nowadays). And that's good for hardware companies, because it forces users to buy newer hardware.

It is some kind of systemic programmed obsolescence. It's just bad for the consumers, because they haven't gained much in 20 years, other than an obligation to buy new hardware regularly if they want their experience to stay bearable.

Out of those million email clients, probably less than 50 are regularly maintained with good support. And I am probably exaggerating the number 50. Could be single digits.

You don't need 50 you need just one. Thunderbird itself checks all the boxes.

There are many webmail clients which you can host yourself and connect to GMail by IMAP/POP3: https://itsfoss.com/open-source-web-based-email-clients/

[dupe]

They know that anything simple and widely compatible is against their goals. Their excuse is "web standards are open" --- the same highly complex standards they control and churn so frequently that implementations beyond their own are basically discouraged and can't keep up. Their hostilities have ramped up most recently with things like WEI, but this is their next step. It was never really about making things better for the users. It was always about complete control: taking over the Internet and forcing users to a run a "supported" software and hardware stack, one that they both fully control and will deprecate or "EOL" on their schedule to force users into the next stage of their control.

Basic HTML, like any other simple and easily understood systems that anyone can implement without much effort, are essentially a threat to their agenda.

To paraphrase an old saying: "Gmail ain't done 'til Firefox won't run."

Basic HTML Gmail can very easily just not be worth the effort given there surely can’t be that many people like you that would actually use it. Indeed Gmail pioneered HTML-driven interactive web applications to a large extent. It’s easy to kick and scream about acts of malice but it’s a lot harder to look inwards and realise that the vast vast vast majority of people just don’t care for this particular techno-puritan hill that you seem willing to die on.

Indeed Gmail pioneered HTML-driven interactive web applications to a large extent.

I think you're misremembering this. Web Outlook's needs are what drove the enabling technology, a few years before GMail appeared.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

GMail had its own early selling points early on, one of them being much more storage than competitors.

I disagree. Gmail is what popularized single page app ajaxy webmail client.

If i remember, xmlhttprequest was originally for the desktop outlook client not the website. Gmail was special because it was a website not desktop app.

Edit: seems like i'm wrong. I'd still argue that gmail is what brought it to popular attention for the masses.

Desktop Outlook had no need for XHR --- it was a native application. As the parent comment's link and this link therein says, XHR was used for the web client:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexho...

In my memories it was Google Maps that brought AJAX to the masses.

You could do interactive web apps before XMLHttpRequest by using frames--plain frames, then later iframes. Circa 2001 I wrote an employee clock-in and reporting web application this way, which made it much more responsive, especially over a modem. It used frames to push and pull data (i.e. JavaScript variables) dynamically, and Layers on Netscape and nascent innerHTML on IE to rebuild tables with new data. The latter techniques I had learned from a truly pioneering developer publishing demos in what was called DHTML (dynamic HTML), an early name for JavaScript-driven, client-side page generation and manipulation that went beyond basic img src swapping. Among other things, that developer had written an amazing Asteroids clone. I forgot their site name; it was Dyn-something.

Unfortunately, IIRC IE was rather leaky and the app started to crawl if you used it too much without refreshing the entire page. (I left that job before the app went live, so I don't know if they deployed it as-is or reverted to full server-side mode.) IMO, what really made interactive web apps more practical was both Netscape and IE--but especially IE--getting their act together and writing a browser that didn't leak memory life a sieve when you made heavy use of their new APIs for manipulating the document dynamically.

EDIT: Dan Steinman and DynAPI: https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/

yeah DHTML which interestingly enough was another Microsoft-promoted thing. They were trying to tie up the open Web with their own tech but as a vision of the Web as an app platform, it was really quite forward-looking/prescient.

Alternatively, you have gotten used to Google providing you free services out of the goodness of their heart.

This model was sustainable when the internet was adding millions of users per year, but as internet access reaches saturation - Google must do something.

I'd prefer if it was "pay for your email" - but internet users have been openly hostile to paying for anything for 39 years

They sell user data, so, it's not really free.

> out of the goodness of their heart.

I think you missed something in their business model.

> To paraphrase an old saying: "Gmail ain't done 'til Firefox won't run."

Except gmail has great compatibility with firefox.

Honestly all these google are evil conspiracies are exhausting. Its not that google wouldn't be evil, its just that the simple reason makes much more sense, especially from a business perspective. Google does what is best for google. It obviously shuts down little used projects to save $$$, not as a personal vendetta against individual hn users.

> Google does what is best for google.

And that happens to be evil for whoever is not Google. No need for a conspiracy here.

Google loves to mess with other browsers, in ways that evoke plausible deniability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20658912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027

Or ... just maintaining two frontends is a lot of work? For something used by relatively few people? No conspiracy needed.

And I believe gmail works fine with Firefox? Did last time I used it anyway. Does it not work for you?

And gmail still supports POP/IMAP and SMTP I assume? Whenever I had to use gmail for work I used to Hillary my emails to FastMail. Always worked pretty well. Can also mutt or Thunderbird or whatnot.

The basic HTML frontend hasn't changed in years. I don't see what sort of special maintenance is needed for it, or why it would be a "lot" of work.

It will need to be compatible with any changes made for the standard frontend, it will need servers to run it, the code can't forever keep running on Java 1.2 or PHP 4.2 or whatever, you will need to retain expertise on it all, etc. etc.

Maintaining these things, even without user-visible changes, can actually be quite time-consuming and difficult.

I was always horrified (and still am) about the sheer size of crap the GMail frontend pulls in. 40MB of garbage, out of which 25 MB is minified Javascript (with using uBlock original and PiHole. Not sure what's the amount without filters). And soon it will be mandatory to use in browsers.

"Funnily", Thunderbird deb file is 53MB.

There is no reason to use gmail.

Preferably pay for some other service. And if you haven't already, buy your own domain.

Being tied to one service is never good, even if it isn't by google.

If your employer uses Gmail, there is a reason to use it.

Maybe, but at least don't do mail in the browser.

It's also a good reason to choose a different employer.

Yeah. That's the first thing I ask during an interview - "What email provider do you use?". If they say"GMail" I just close the Google Meet tab in my Google Chrome mid-sentence. I can tolerate a lot from an employer, but not GMail. /s

You are being sarcastic, but whether an employer is self-hosting or is using cloud services (and which ones) is actually an important consideration for me, because it impacts QoL and is an indication of the employer’s values and competences.

Are you implying that GMail itself is a bad service, and you get better email QoL from the local IT folks, who think that Firefox is not compatible with displaying Stackoverflow? The bad things about Google could be listed for weeks without stopping for a coffeebreak, but "GMail is a bad email service" wouldn't be mentioned (if we disregard the web frontend).

How many water, sewer, garbage, and electrical services do you subscribe to at home?

My toilet only spies on me after I took three hits if acid

I know this was in jest, but most municipalities are collecting metadata through sewage treatment

This is where some of the most reliable COVID data came from

Your toilet actually spies on you quite a lot. Just not you individually, but your city and health officials actively monitor your “output” to keep track of things like disease spreading. Doesn’t just stop there though, your acid usage might well have ticked into some drug monitoring program.

Sounds better anonymized than any bullshit "we remove your name and IP from your data and call it anonymized", though.

Yeah it's a good thing that there is nothing in our sewer output that could be directly traced back to individual persons like an IPv4 could.

Please answer this question: say I give you a hair I found somewhere in the city. How do you proceed to identify who the owner of that hair is? Not theoretically; in practice, right now.

Now compare that to an IPv4. Do you get my point?

One of each, but is your point that those are essentially monopolies in many places? Email still isn't a monopoly, even if most people do use Google!

No, my point was that the GP said:

> Being tied to one service is never good

And furthermore, I could ask if you're multi-homed on the Internet? Got your own ASN with a BGP session and a /24 delegation? Your ISP's not a monopoly, so why are so many people "tied to one service"?

What about your health insurance? BCBS and UHC as a backup? Do you have more than one PCP?

Ah, but it's not good being tied to one of each service; it's just extremely impractical to have parallel infrastructure in some cases. (I've been without plumbed water before because the water service failed locally. It would certainly have been nice to have a competitor available.) The fact that monopolies exist isn't evidence that more monopolies is what we want.

The answer to the rest of your questions is "… yes, isn't this pretty normal?".

Multi-homing your Internet connection is in a completely different category of service because it's so trivial to fail over, but in fact my phone is routinely multi-homed (to a WiFi network and through 5G), and my laptop will fall back to its hotspot, so yes; aren't many people? That redundancy is enough for me not to run my own Internet infrastructure.

I have two parallel medical infrastructures (the NHS and private insurance), which I routinely switch between as appropriate; again, in my social class this is common. I have multiple credit cards, which is the closest I come to PCP, which is again common, and again I routinely switch between them.

That depends on who is defining "good" and what your criteria are. There are drawbacks and there are advantages to these things. You've faced some practical realities and admitted that we can't always have this idealistic consumerist candyland choice of a box of chocolates full of providers of every rainbow service under the sun. Please don't make blanket generalizations about value judgements that may have different factors for different people or organizations. It's paternalistic and condescending.

Sure, anyone is free to define anything they like as "good". If you like being unable to change providers for things, then that is certainly your prerogative (and boy do I need to learn how to start selling services to you)! I predict that most people have very different utility functions to you in this area, though.

> There is no reason to use gmail

Free service, perfect deliverability, never having to spell the part after "@", great spam filters, not having to "migrate" your address and emails anywhere else. There's a lot of reasons, actually.

One might not like Google, but you can't say there's "no reason"

There was some implied context in my comment given the HN audience.

Gmails spam filters are quite bad, but even worse than that is staggering amount of important emails they classify as spam. So gmails spam filter is only decent if you don't care about email. And if you don't care about email, sure, you can find reasons to tolerate gmail.

Why you'd do that, well, that is another question.

Search is also particularly bad with gmail.

> Free service

Nothing is free. You just pay differently.

> Perfect deliverability

I have never lost an e-mail with my non-GMail accounts. GMail is not the only reliable service out there.

> never having to spell the part after "@"

Sad to think that this would be the reason for GMail's monopoly, but well...

> great spam filters

I don't get much spam with alternative services, not sure if there is a formal comparison somewhere?

> not having to "migrate" your address and emails anywhere else

And not being able to, ever. And once you get out of free space because for some reason your smartphone automatically syncs with Google Drive and you don't know how to remove stuff you don't need (and you certainly don't want to lose that picture you didn't know existed), then you can start paying 2$ a month to get more space and keep your peace of mind.

No really, the one reason I see for GMail is that it is well known (no need to think about what server you want) and it is free. The rest is basically lock-in.

Sigh.

No. I don’t pay. Take my data, it’s there. It’s free. Stop with this nonsense. When you pay your bills do you think they’re not selling your data? Right.

> Stop with this nonsense.

On the case for not collecting everything about everybody: what when we get a ChatGPT trained on that where one can go ask "how can I manipulate [person] to do [something]"? Or "give me material to blackmail people that are likely to pay me"? People believe that it is not insane to think about sending humanity into space, that quantum computers will be a thing and that technology can solve the climate crisis. Why would it be worse to think that data is power?

Then ignoring the argument above, they don't just "take your data" that is "there". They harvest it. It makes their websites heavier, which makes you pay for a better internet connection and better hardware for no other reason. It makes them create addictive services so that you lose half of your life swiping meaningless infinite pages. Or it polarizes discussions online, promoting fake news and whatever engages people (usually not constructively).

Please take a step back, and tell me what has changed in e-mails in the last 30 years that actually makes your life better. Something that would justify not being able to use e-mails today with a 30 years-old computer. We're talking about e-mails here, but just think about that for anything "free" that you are using today.

The software industry wastes a lot of resources into "taking your data", because it makes money. What if we actually reflected about what technology is, and how it can serve society? We do have pretty big problems to solve, would be nice if the best software engineers out there were paid to work on them, instead of getting 5x the salary to improve ads online.

Ok you ranted about data collection, but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

Data collection exists whether you pay for a service or not. Since Google does not have my CC info, Gmail is 100% free of charge, regardless of how you define data collection.

> but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

It is not the core business model of every single company.

And no, not every single company does it... For instance, if you don't want your ISP to track you, you can use a VPN. And the core business of a VPN service is to not track you. If they do and it gets known, their out of business.

PM probably wants to push some new features and is sick accommodating a mode used by less than 0.01% of users. Sad but not surprising.

I'm one of the users of it. it means that I'm going full tb mode there.

That's probably the reality of the situation. The number of people using the basic HTML mode might be vanishingly small, even if the user base is very vocal. Also when you have as many users as gmail, even 0.01 percent is going to be millions of users.

There may be a business case for someone to make a gmail client, or a competitor for those relying on the basic HTML mode. What is a rounding error for Google could be a pretty compelling business for a much smaller company.

> even 0.01 percent is going to be millions of users.

This would mean that Gmail have >10 billion users, so obviously not.

Honestly I think 0.01% would be optimistic. Most people that don't like Gmail's fancy features just use third party clients. Unless Google decides to start blocking third party clients, which I could imagine them doing.

Why not use a lightweight native client instead? If you don’t like the standard Gmail web view, there are dozens of options out there, on every platform imaginable.

This is the tenfourfox blog. Tenfourfox is a browser that is still built for old power pc macs. I doubt any modern “lightweight” client is built for those or would even be lightweight enough to run on them.

On the other hand, for those platforms imap should still be available.

Edit: forgot to mention that said power pcs wouldn’t be fast enough to run googles full web ui either.

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