It's funny, I absolutely love Inbox, but that's going away in favor of the "improved" Gmail which supposedly incorporated many things from Inbox - but I can't stand the new Gmail either.
Ditto. I finally bit the bullet this week and made the switch from Inbox back to Gmail since Inbox is headed to the guillotine.
So far I’m finding it awful. Miss my bundling and I miss swiping to snooze on iOS (swiping both directions archives in iOS though I’ve heard it’s configurable in Android)
Interesting. I switched to the new Gmail, and I actually can't remember what the old one looked like already. I'm sure Google will do just fine ignoring all these requests and their billion+ users will adapt.
The biggest problem in my opinion is not the new looks, but the degraded performance.
It seems after just opening GMail the website tries to cache every listed email in your inbox. After that is done, it becomes faster. My use case is not to leave GMail open in a tab all the time, so I have to suffer through this caching period every time GMail is opened now.
This, together with the recent Google-China upheaval, is the final straw for me. I've had a GMail account since the beginning, and am now looking into alternatives (ProtonMail, self-hosting).
My biggest issue (that users will find hard to ignore) is the lag. The new UI loads noticeably slower... And I don't feel like it's giving me anything useful to compensate for the lag.
Seen this type of comment thread before countless times on the Google support forum. They'll placate the complainers by saying they're listening to feedback and then only pay heed to the positive comments and not change a thing. De rigeur for businesses. The general type of dishonesty is quite amazing. Yes, people are maybe excessively resistant to change, but when everyone is telling you something sucks, your customers, who do you listen to, them or your marketing department, oh wait, don't answer that.
Replying to self: judging from the voting here people on HN have a poor view of business. I'll point out Stripe or most smaller tech companies as an example of listening to customer feedback and doing something about it.
The folks at Google aren't idiots. They now that there is a vocal minority of complainers, most of whom will accept the new UI after a week or two. For a customer base the size of GMail, placating every complaint is just not in the interest of their business.
That is one of the downsides of dominant marker players. Microsoft had the same leverage with Windows 10 (this round of complaints feels similar, although the focus is different).
People who don't like it should use IMAP/SMTP (until GMail shuts that down), or vote with their wallet and go somewhere else. The world could do with more competition for email.
Agreed, but what do Google get out of making the new version?
The biggest negative business impact for them is that the new version makes talented developers less likely to want to work there. When Gmail first came out, it was breath of fresh air. It showed how to do email right. I remember wishing that I worked a company that could create such brilliant software.
By the way, to use IMAP/SMTP you will need to switch "enable unsecure apps" in Google Account preferences. Google considers all auth methods except OAuth2 to be insecure (and OAuth2 doesn't work in my slightly outdated version of Thunderbird). But I think the opposite: with OAuth2 the token is stored on your device, with password auth the password is not stored anywhere.
It just force-updated for me. I had clicked the "wait two weeks" (or however many weeks) prompts, delaying the inevitable, but had thought I would at least still be able to click the "revert" button as soon as the change occurred. There was no button this time.
So I clicked through to the "simple HTML" version as soon as the link presented itself at the bottom of the fancy new splash screen and have been a little less unhappy ever since.
Now I just need to quit talking about it and finally finish my move out of Google's house. Everything else is out except for the email. The damn email.
My biggest problem with the new UI is the font. Roboto, or whatever font they are using, is terrible to read a lot of small text. I wish the font could be set to Helvetica or disable web fonts for Gmail.
With the old UI I don’t have to scroll down to see the labels that I frequently go to. The new UI uses a heavier font that the labels list takes up more vertical space than they used to which is becoming a nag for me.
But even if they were 100,000, that would be a small fraction of the user base and you could still say the user base is either indifferent or satisfied with the change.
Simply put, normies count. Not us. Even if 1% (few million users?) are upset now, this wouldn't make google change their mind serving 99% unaware users.
I don't understand. We (at least the folks who are unhappy with this update) are the users of the application. The complaints pertain to issues which affect both "normies" and "us" alike. If I observe an unresponsive/lagging behavior, it isn't because I may be more technically inclined, but because my brain detected an unexpected delay between my input and the outcome.
“It’s fine, only people who know what they’re talking about eilll realise how slow it is” is a terrible view to have when developing a piece of software!
I think this response often comes up in response to complaints about UI changes. Sometimes it’s a valid response, and people are just being resistant to change. Sometimes the changes are genuinely bad. The point is - the fact that people complain about everything doesn’t mean that some of the things they complain about aren’t legitimate problems!
Legitimate or not, what the user perceives as problematic may make total sense for the business providing the service. Google (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) is not a non-profit or government agency that acts in the interests of the people. It's a business operating on capitalist principles, so profit is, by design, their main drive (of the business as such, not necessarily of the individuals who work there).
Somehow we insist on treating these mega-corporations as if they are always beneficent, and anytime one of them does something that doesn't align the user's and business interests, there is a storm of complaints like this.
Sure, it would be nice if a mega-corporation always acted in its user's interests, but that's not how the current system works.
Ideally, we'd end up with a system where you just pay a company to host your on-line end-points, keeping all data and the software you use personal, and you have the option to move to a competitor at a moment's notice, keeping all identifiers (like an email address now). Where just not there yet.
You have a good point, which is that cars have a horrible UI. One of the most important requirements is the ability to brake fast in an emergency, yet the UI requires you to physically move your foot to another pedal before you can even start to brake.
Why don't they change the UI, then? Mostly because of regulations, I think. It's unclear to me whether bringing a new driving UI to the market would be horribly difficult, costly and risky, or just plain impossible.
While you and a million others might not like the new $webapp UI, it's still a good thing that they can and do get changed. Especially in this case considering you can start using any email client anytime if you don't like the web UI.
Considering Gmail takes seconds to load now (250Mbit link, Ryzen 8core, 32 GB RAM), I don't see myself using Gmail if they upgrade in the same fashion in 6 months.
Consider all the people who still use sysvinit and (a fork of) GNOME 2. (Yes, I think many who oppose systemd do so because of the UI change.) And consider the much larger group that initially opposed that were strong opponents for a while but have now moved on.
It took over 20 seconds for the compose Window to pop up today.
Yes it was the first time on load, but why did Gmail take 30 seconds to load before it was usable? Why did a website take as long to load as my entire OS? 32GB of RAM, 4+4 cores, what the hell is going on?
I just tested again, 34 seconds from hitting enter at "gmail.com" to getting a compose window loaded.
Gmail used to be lightening fast, an example of what an amazing HTML5 webapp could be. Now it is a joke.
For me it's not about look but speed: Gmail simply can't put text in the compose box as fast as I can type it.
Gmail is the slowest web app I use.
From what I've read Google, for whatever reason, don't care about Gmail perf and use slow deprecated APIs in Firefox and Edge even when faster ones are available. The DOM looks like garbage with massive amounts of unnecessary elements.
It's basically the opposite pf everything every Chrome Developer Advocate says about web performance.
Don't get me started about the compose box (really any text box with their "rich text" implementation). It is terrible.
Like you said, the input alone has crazy latency. But the logic built into their formatting sends me through the roof most of the time.
Don't want bold text? Too bad, you're getting bold text because you enabled bold text one time about 10 minutes ago. Even though you disabled bold text, like, a second after you enabled it, you just now hit the enter key so you get bold text! And don't you even think about returning to non-formatted typing after you just pasted-in some text which may or may not have had formatting applied even though you did the very special kind of paste where plain, non-formatted text is supposed to be rendered!
One response I have is that it was vaguely perfect approx 6 years ago. And it's just clinkier feeling in terms of responsiveness and visual apace efficiently . . And probably a better point is to say: I might be wrong at the analysis level/efficiency numbers. . But if my brain is stressed out from the change enough that I'm laying here on a Saturday ranting and getting worked up on this apparently along with others here, prioritising this over normal leisure & conversing /entertaining out of town guests... There may be some unnamed metric here that isn't measured and represents a negative impact on users?
I prefer email clients to web-mail. I have multiple email addresses so I use email clients to manage my accounts; contacts, calendar, meeting schedule lookups, view multiple mail accounts, reply from multiple mail accounts, less passwords to remember etc.
Same thing happened with Google maps a couple of years ago. They changed the UI to one a lot less functional, gave users an option to use the old UI for a while, then took it away. Now we're stuck with gmaps that are much worse than they used to be.
Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.
The layout takes up more of the screen, which I kinda like, but my issue was always how terrible terribly slow it is now. It's so laggy, compared to competitors like Here and OSM. The Fruit co could probably give Google a run if they opened up a web version.
Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.
New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.
It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.
> The Fruit co could probably give Google a run if they opened up a web version.
This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)
Does anyone know a good web based OpenStreetMap renderer? And a service that hosts tiles for it? I just wanted to make something like Google Maps Navigation but web based. Google Maps doesn’t really let you rotate the maps by heading, and more. We did some hacks but I would like more control!
I've found this to be true of every piece of Google software. The only app by Google I still have on my phone is Gmail, and that's because I haven't updated it in a really long time. Everything else I've replaced with some alternative.
I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.
Google is just incredibly unreliable. The one Google app which I've really taken to over the past few years is Inbox, so of course it's being discontinued.
I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.
It had maps. No, seriously, you open up maps to use the maps and you can't because the map barely takes up any screen estate.
On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!
On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.
They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.
Once you move the map most of the bloat is hidden for me.
Regardless I agree with your sentiment. I'm betting we'll come full circle at some point - or else they'll lose their maps users to some equivelant of duckduckgo.
After switching back to Firefox quantum 4 months ago I find the Google Maps web UI slows down to an unusable experience. Since then, I have been using the Bing Maps web UI. Who would have thought there is a day MS product is triumphant over a Google one. A new life cycle has just begun I am aware.
OK, hang on, i'm with you that the initial redesign had less features, and was slower, but people forget that Google Maps used to have 2 buttons - Maps and Satelite view.
Then they added Terrain
Then they added a little Street View guy
By making a pullout hamburger menu on the side, they were able to add:
* Traffic
* Google earth/globe integration
* Notifications
* Location Sharing
* Your maps (used to be an entirely different site)
* Your contributions
* Your timelines
* Multiple sharing options
* Transit - including schedule exploring
* Bicycle - including topographical elevation changes
And that's before you get to languages, tours, tips and tricks, settings, history, and ability to provide missing data.
Oh and every location, with contact information, photos, and menus.
You don't have to like the design aesthetic, and you can complain that all these features made the product unusably slow, but the re-design was NECESSARY to add the new features.
Why not use a desktop/mobile mail client of your choice to access gmail over open protocols? Then they can clown up the web UI all they want and it won't matter to you.
If you are using multiple machines, your desktop client will be a huge headache to set up each. Business computers at work have outlook, but personally, I cannot use the client(s) for my 6+ separate computers. Browser email is the way to go.
OK, but "huge headache" is somewhat exaggerated. For many clients, gmail connection settings are a preset option, where you enter a username and application password. It's a one-time configuration.
> outlook
My condolences.
> my 6+ separate computers
You are perhaps an outlier? But I can see how it's a hassle in your particular case.
Outlook type of software download all of the emails. Which means gigabytes per account. I use multiple google emails (gsuite), and this makes things harder.
I don’t understand why gmail ties their functionality to skins so much in gmail. This is the third time they’ve forced a UI change for no functional reason, just that they wanted easier maintenance.
I really got bugged in 2011 when they got rid of their terminal theme [0].
I don’t think this is a UI issue, I think it’s just poor design where a skin would somehow not perform well. It seems pretty easy to maintain different simple skins or to provide an API.
Scrolling the list of emails is very choppy on Safari, and works on Chrome and Firefox. How annoying. We're entering a new browser monoculture where something only has to work on Chrome :/
I think it's a good time to test out a few self-hosted email clients, perhaps storing emails on a mail server that retrieves incoming mail from gmail, and sends out via gmail as well to avoid the authentication/blacklisting/spam filtering hassles.
RainLoop looks pretty good for a web client. Any suggestions on clients or mail servers (only to fetch mail from gmail or outlook)?
The UI is horrible and it has already been discussed in many places, but to me the slowness is the no.1 problem. I thought it was just a hiccup when they had it on optional mode, but now it's plain slow. I've tried on different connections and different browsers and they all seem to generate the same result. Super slow loading times of the interface and the emails.
I still remember when gmail was the fastest kid on the block or when they've optimized chrome for a faster gmail. But now I'm really looking into alternatives.
Last week I've switched from chrome to firefox because of the synced login thing, and gmail will be a bit more complex to change instantly but I'll surely find a way.
Man, last week a friend asked me to set him up with an email account through Dreamhost shared hosting. My first reaction was "who does this anymore" but after 10 minutes passed (he already had a website there) I was sending him IMAP server information and thinking, "I have got to move on something like this, I'll bet it's 200% faster than current GMail." It's not going to be a GSuite-level toolset for him, of course, but wow, simple email like that is a huge portion of my personal use case.
Isn’t spam the main problem nowadays? I find a hosted mail unusable without some spamfilter in front that is either costly or comes with your corporate accounts.
I don't think so. I was using a selfhosted email for years and never had any problems with spam. You just need to configure your email services to use some DNS block lists like those: zen.spamhaus.org bl.spamcop.net and so on.
Also, setup DMARC and SPF entries for your domain. https://dmarc.org/
I have been using self hosted email for two years, spam, I have received < 5 spam emails targeted to my personal email address. Last spammy email was in February. Those mails were impersonating a read friend of mine and real people we both knew or they knew were in CC.
I did receive:
- several spam emails by week until May on another domain I host (at info@<domain> and contact@<domain>, easy to filter out)
- one spam last month at info@<mypersonaldomain>, also easy to filter out.
All of these spammy emails came from OVH IPs.
It's interesting to see that I haven't received any spam to personalized email addresses I give to stuff that need an email for registration so far.
edit: actually, I just received a spammy email at info@<domain>. So weird. Not from OVH this time.
I've been on a shared-host IMAP server for 20 years. I use my own domains and Tbird or another IMAP client. The host has excellent spam filtering (spam assassin & procmail) and doesn't spy on me. I even use gmail (but rarely) through an IMAP client. That way I never have to see their web UI.
I challenge you to name a single mail client which doesn't use graphics hardware acceleration in some form.
Even an old fashioned DOS computers console display modes are graphics acceleration - that's why it doesn't have to draw the fonts pixel by pixel - the graphics hardware gets them out of a ROM in real-time.
If the UI is your only concern, why not try one of the hundreds of native email clients available for whatever operating system you may be running? I haven’t used Google’s web interface in years.
I don’t consider there to be anything technically interesting here, neither with regard to design. Flag and move on.
As others have mentioned: a vocal minority always dislike UI changes, but in six months it will be the new normal.
One thing I will say though, it’s starting to look like we’ve run out of good UI changes and what we’re served up now is the refried beans / day old reheated leftovers of UI design.
Anyway, the elephant in the room is: move away from Gmail / free email services. Email, for me, is way too important to have no paid support.
From the guidelines: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. "
If you've got a reasonably fast connection and machine, the "load basic HTML (for slow connections)" link at bottom right disappears almost instantly when loading the Gmail web interface.
You can use this direct link to the basic HTML version:
but Google's not quite done with you yet, presenting this message along with two buttons:
Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?
You’re about to use a version of Gmail designed for slower connections and legacy browsers. To get all of Gmail’s features, including inbox categories, images, and quick actions, please use the latest version of Gmail (recommended).
Take me to latest Gmail | I'd like to use HTML Gmail
Selecting the latter button allows you to enjoy an interface from a simpler time.
186 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadThey did the same thing to YouTube, however there is a nice Chrome extension to force the old version.
So far I’m finding it awful. Miss my bundling and I miss swiping to snooze on iOS (swiping both directions archives in iOS though I’ve heard it’s configurable in Android)
Was not meant to show tracing producer/consumer value/fault.
It seems after just opening GMail the website tries to cache every listed email in your inbox. After that is done, it becomes faster. My use case is not to leave GMail open in a tab all the time, so I have to suffer through this caching period every time GMail is opened now.
This, together with the recent Google-China upheaval, is the final straw for me. I've had a GMail account since the beginning, and am now looking into alternatives (ProtonMail, self-hosting).
That is one of the downsides of dominant marker players. Microsoft had the same leverage with Windows 10 (this round of complaints feels similar, although the focus is different).
People who don't like it should use IMAP/SMTP (until GMail shuts that down), or vote with their wallet and go somewhere else. The world could do with more competition for email.
The biggest negative business impact for them is that the new version makes talented developers less likely to want to work there. When Gmail first came out, it was breath of fresh air. It showed how to do email right. I remember wishing that I worked a company that could create such brilliant software.
So I clicked through to the "simple HTML" version as soon as the link presented itself at the bottom of the fancy new splash screen and have been a little less unhappy ever since.
Now I just need to quit talking about it and finally finish my move out of Google's house. Everything else is out except for the email. The damn email.
A few hundred upset users can be misleading.
But even if they were 100,000, that would be a small fraction of the user base and you could still say the user base is either indifferent or satisfied with the change.
That would still be representative. A sample. I don't understand your argument.
“It’s fine, only people who know what they’re talking about eilll realise how slow it is” is a terrible view to have when developing a piece of software!
Sources:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020032...
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8w03ms/is_it_poss...
Somehow we insist on treating these mega-corporations as if they are always beneficent, and anytime one of them does something that doesn't align the user's and business interests, there is a storm of complaints like this.
Sure, it would be nice if a mega-corporation always acted in its user's interests, but that's not how the current system works.
Ideally, we'd end up with a system where you just pay a company to host your on-line end-points, keeping all data and the software you use personal, and you have the option to move to a competitor at a moment's notice, keeping all identifiers (like an email address now). Where just not there yet.
may be the existing UI works fine, and having invested the effort in using it only to be forced to abandon it once again.
Imagine if a car manufacturer keeps changing the wheel and the pedals around.
Why don't they change the UI, then? Mostly because of regulations, I think. It's unclear to me whether bringing a new driving UI to the market would be horribly difficult, costly and risky, or just plain impossible.
While you and a million others might not like the new $webapp UI, it's still a good thing that they can and do get changed. Especially in this case considering you can start using any email client anytime if you don't like the web UI.
Consider all the people who still use sysvinit and (a fork of) GNOME 2. (Yes, I think many who oppose systemd do so because of the UI change.) And consider the much larger group that initially opposed that were strong opponents for a while but have now moved on.
Yes it was the first time on load, but why did Gmail take 30 seconds to load before it was usable? Why did a website take as long to load as my entire OS? 32GB of RAM, 4+4 cores, what the hell is going on?
I just tested again, 34 seconds from hitting enter at "gmail.com" to getting a compose window loaded.
Gmail used to be lightening fast, an example of what an amazing HTML5 webapp could be. Now it is a joke.
Gmail is the slowest web app I use.
From what I've read Google, for whatever reason, don't care about Gmail perf and use slow deprecated APIs in Firefox and Edge even when faster ones are available. The DOM looks like garbage with massive amounts of unnecessary elements.
It's basically the opposite pf everything every Chrome Developer Advocate says about web performance.
Like you said, the input alone has crazy latency. But the logic built into their formatting sends me through the roof most of the time.
Don't want bold text? Too bad, you're getting bold text because you enabled bold text one time about 10 minutes ago. Even though you disabled bold text, like, a second after you enabled it, you just now hit the enter key so you get bold text! And don't you even think about returning to non-formatted typing after you just pasted-in some text which may or may not have had formatting applied even though you did the very special kind of paste where plain, non-formatted text is supposed to be rendered!
Clearly, it has affected me.
Even though I'm using something else, Eudora still rocks by the way. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-eudora-email-client...
Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.
Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.
New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.
It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.
This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)
https://developer.apple.com/maps/mapkitjs/
OSM fortunately doesnt have this problem, nor does Mapscii.
For your phone try OSMand if you haven't already, you can find it on FDroid
I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.
I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.
On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!
On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.
They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.
Regardless I agree with your sentiment. I'm betting we'll come full circle at some point - or else they'll lose their maps users to some equivelant of duckduckgo.
Sad but true. Redesign is also a great way for managers to increase their budgets.
"If it ain't broke, redesign it."
But they should get demoted for making good products bad.
Then they added a little Street View guy
By making a pullout hamburger menu on the side, they were able to add: * Traffic * Google earth/globe integration * Notifications * Location Sharing * Your maps (used to be an entirely different site) * Your contributions * Your timelines * Multiple sharing options * Transit - including schedule exploring * Bicycle - including topographical elevation changes
And that's before you get to languages, tours, tips and tricks, settings, history, and ability to provide missing data.
Oh and every location, with contact information, photos, and menus.
You don't have to like the design aesthetic, and you can complain that all these features made the product unusably slow, but the re-design was NECESSARY to add the new features.
The only way to settle this one, is to wait for one of the following groups of people to go extinct:
- those who like round things - those who like rectangles
Anyway, what’s painful about setting up multiple clients?
OK, but "huge headache" is somewhat exaggerated. For many clients, gmail connection settings are a preset option, where you enter a username and application password. It's a one-time configuration.
> outlook
My condolences.
> my 6+ separate computers
You are perhaps an outlier? But I can see how it's a hassle in your particular case.
Even if you have 6+ computers.
I really got bugged in 2011 when they got rid of their terminal theme [0].
I don’t think this is a UI issue, I think it’s just poor design where a skin would somehow not perform well. It seems pretty easy to maintain different simple skins or to provide an API.
[0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...
I think it's a good time to test out a few self-hosted email clients, perhaps storing emails on a mail server that retrieves incoming mail from gmail, and sends out via gmail as well to avoid the authentication/blacklisting/spam filtering hassles.
RainLoop looks pretty good for a web client. Any suggestions on clients or mail servers (only to fetch mail from gmail or outlook)?
I did receive:
- several spam emails by week until May on another domain I host (at info@<domain> and contact@<domain>, easy to filter out)
- one spam last month at info@<mypersonaldomain>, also easy to filter out.
All of these spammy emails came from OVH IPs.
It's interesting to see that I haven't received any spam to personalized email addresses I give to stuff that need an email for registration so far.
edit: actually, I just received a spammy email at info@<domain>. So weird. Not from OVH this time.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
How do you know this ?
Do you mind giving the name of the shared hosting?
Posteo.de
Mailfence
Runbox
Mailbox.org
Even an old fashioned DOS computers console display modes are graphics acceleration - that's why it doesn't have to draw the fonts pixel by pixel - the graphics hardware gets them out of a ROM in real-time.
As others have mentioned: a vocal minority always dislike UI changes, but in six months it will be the new normal.
One thing I will say though, it’s starting to look like we’ve run out of good UI changes and what we’re served up now is the refried beans / day old reheated leftovers of UI design.
Anyway, the elephant in the room is: move away from Gmail / free email services. Email, for me, is way too important to have no paid support.
Paid support (and other features) is $1.99/mo.
https://one.google.com/about
Also, paid support is just one piece of the puzzle. More important is to not be locked in.
So buy your own domain and if you really want Gmail then pay for G Suite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can use this direct link to the basic HTML version:
http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
but Google's not quite done with you yet, presenting this message along with two buttons:
Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?
You’re about to use a version of Gmail designed for slower connections and legacy browsers. To get all of Gmail’s features, including inbox categories, images, and quick actions, please use the latest version of Gmail (recommended).
Take me to latest Gmail | I'd like to use HTML Gmail
Selecting the latter button allows you to enjoy an interface from a simpler time.