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Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

I am confused by the reaction to this. It seems like the only people adversely affected by this would be people who rely on borrowing others’ devices and therefore cannot use a native mail client.

The discussion here is centered on bandwidth and accessibility, and both of those problems are solved by using the mail client that (almost definitely) shipped with your device.

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The set of people adversely affected is even smaller than that: it's people who would actually use the basic HTML in the future, which can be closely approximated by the people who use it now.

Google knows the numbers for that, we don't. But it's striking how few "I use this UI in situation X" comments this story and its duplicates have. Most of the comments are by people who at best imagine it would be something they'd use, but actually don't. (And at worst the comments are by people who don't know what the basic HTML UI was, but are here to complain about other aspects of gmail.)

One use case is the web view allows you to check emails of a workspace that requires a Google Device policy to be installed to use the native apps. Of course, the simple solution is to be given a workplace phone or don't check emails when away from a computer.

You seem to be conflating computing with mobile devices and that makes me sad...

Not at all! Where do you get that impression?

Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions ship with mail clients that you can set up to use with Gmail.

I wonder how many people on earth are accessing webmail from a device that does not have a mail client installed.

All desktop and mobile operating systems come with native email clients.

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