Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
For me it's so unresponsive that I'm at a loss for words how google put this into production. I have a modern, new computer and modern, urban internet good enough for streaming 1080p on Twitch without interruption, but I can't delete or archive an email anymore without waiting 4-6 seconds for it to complete the action.
What has your experience been like with it?
edit: Guess I'm not alone. I can only hope someone working at Google sees this post or cares. Maybe too much to hope for.
221 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] thread>You get what you pay for
Could you try disabling google ads, buying a couple of products and report back if it improves the user experience?
I moved to my own domain, and use emacs + mu4e and have had zero problems. I do still have my old gmail address forwarded to my mail server and can reply when needed.
However, the personal stuff I keep it for Firefox, and it's just as OP said: 4-6 seconds to complete an action and even when the UI has loaded, not all icons are shown immediately.
Not sure what I’m going to do when it switches over for our Google Apps account. Any alternatives people like?
I've found myself going to gmail.com, searching for something, and then waiting 30 seconds for "Loading..."to transform to "Something's not right". I've just started doing all reading on the Android app.
It's still easier for me to write at my laptop than on my phone, so this miserable experience happens to me multiple times a week. I've started to deeply despise the webapp.
It presented me with two options: Now, Delay One Week.
Instead of choosing one, I adblocked the notification. Two weeks later I'm still on the old gmail that responds to clicks. Hoping it never changes.
The redesign is absolutely horrible, and just like OP, I find it unusably slow (on a beasty Gaming PC).
I got Fastmail, and redirect my Gmail which will now only be used as a spam address. Exactly the same as when I went Hotmail to Gmail and Hotmail because my spam address.
The tech cycle continues.
If I do get forced to the new gmail web version I'll likely switch to a desktop client or write my own client if I can't find a tolerable one.
I've taken to using Windows Mail for my gmail usage half the time anyway now, even though I'm still on the old web client.
Fastmail is great, though.
It's not just an issue of speed. The new gmail design is very hard to read/understand. Red-on-pink is not the best contrast choice. The icons feel fuzzy without the button borders, are hard to decode, and are too tight together.
Strangely, while the icons are all packed tightly, the email list wastes extra space vertically, and requires extra scrolling. Not the best design choice.
The high-contrast theme brings gmail close to the classic design, but it does not work well enough to make the icons more recognizable and recover the wasted space in the email list.
Have you compared the phone or tablet version to the PC or laptop version?
Just curious.
I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the last 5 years or so, and it's just as irritating to me --- especially when resolving user-complaints take a backseat to improving whatever useless metric-of-the-week the management have thought of.
It doesn't have to be "the customer is always right", but I've found that companies are increasingly becoming more deliberately ignorant of user's concerns and instead focusing on furthering their own agenda.
It's much older, but previously you'd see it more in the desktop space.
As for the server, an interesting thing happened: the proprietary software used to follow similar trend (I'm talking to you, big fat database vendors), with some open-source projects behaving the same. But people are not stupid: you realize you win by serving your clients fast and that very often speed is more important than functionality. Hence the success of projects like Nginx or Redis.
From a marketing perspective, though, it's not. I saw a startup once where the non-technical cofounders had apparently managed to build a non-dynamic single-page React application as their homepage (basically a basic website but in React ooohhh aaahhh). They were using the fact that they did that as a selling point. Almost all of the non-tech people in the room ate it up completely and praised them for their launch.
You can absolutely do a good responsive design in pure HTML+CSS. What seems to happen in practice, though, is pages that appear as flat white if I don't fiddle with my NoScript settings, and that grind on my (admittedly not top-of-the-line) computer if I do.
I've heard that you can use http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ to get a basic HTML version.
No need to use HTTP instead of HTTPS.
Can't believe "download more RAM lol" is acceptable behavior.
Example - /,"is:unread to:me",Enter. Should search for unread mails to me.
On a regular basis if I move through five items rapidly and head into this search, it just shows a blank screen inside the area where the mails should be. Even hitting f5 won't resolve the issue at times. Ive actually stopped browsing through mails on some other threads because of this issue because it would take up too much time to keep debugging Gmail.