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Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#181

Post by spinchange »

tzury wrote: post #127

I haven’t come across better mail UI than Inbox. Inbox got demoted, new Gmail got promoted. If what I was told is true, then at Google, data beats opinions, that is, they have data to back up those decisions. Now, why am I not convinced this is the case over here?

I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for the same reason, but I too am unconvinced.

As one example/anecdotal aside: replacing a link to all mail from/to a contact on mouseover of their name with....links to Google Keep, Hangouts, etc. There's no way the use case data led to a change like this. I mean, how could it?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#182

Post by dabockster »

ndnxhs wrote: post #76
bunderbunder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, sluggish websites seem to result from the popularity of "responsive design".

Isn't responsive design essentially just CSS media queries?

From a tech perspective, yes.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#183

Post by dabockster »

userbinator wrote: post #24

Not directly related, but I reckon the mentality of some web developers I've complained to about their "appsites" being sluggish is similar here --- "it works perfectly fine for me, how about you upgrade your hardware?" I've heard that you can use http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ to get a basic HTML version.

Cool, let me run out and buy a Threadripper 2990WX plus $500+ in custom watercooling equipment just to load my email in under five seconds.

Can't believe "download more RAM lol" is acceptable behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#184

Post by jjeaff »

beerlord wrote: post #119
iamwil wrote: post #43

Yes. I was complaining into the air on twitter, and their support responded by asking me to clear the cache and cookie. I told them: no man, it's not cache and cookies. You're loading too much stuff on initialization. It takes about 45 seconds for page load, and it's not until 1m37s that I can compose an email. You're making about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. That's the size of a long pop song on iTunes!…

It was enough for me to take my staff over to a Microsoft-hosted email account. Outlooks just sits in the background using a few dozen megabytes, and has a better UI than Gmail. You don't need to hunt through Chrome tabs to find your email client, or load a webpage each time you want to check email. Having a native desktop application is a much better experience.

It's a shame that everyone is moving away from native applications.

Web apps and things like electron have their place. But if you are creating an application to be used all the time, you should make it native.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#185

Post by jjeaff »

jcranmer wrote: post #115
bassman9000 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. This is insane. So I went to test it. 358 requests, 6.3MB, 20 seconds till full load. Compared to the standard, really old view ( https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en ): 14 requests, 25.3KB, 2 seconds. Edit: fans were spinning hard, so I opened the task manager: after CPU went down from ~90% tab is using 600-700MB, stable, with the dev console open, 400-…

... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB, which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received for several years."

They have to track your every mouse move, what you type, when you type, where you hover your cursor, how long you took to type an email, who knows what else. Extreme surveillance takes extreme resources.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#186

Post by jjeaff »

NightlyDev wrote: post #131
bunderbunder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, sluggish websites seem to result from the popularity of "responsive design".

Responsive design isn't to blame at all. The "Javascript all the things" approach is to blame.

If it was only JavaScript, we'd be fine. But it's a JavaScript framework, built on some other JavaScript frameworks with tons of dependencies, then an entire new dependency plugin for every little thing you need to do like check if something "is an array".

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#187

Post by x13 »

ndnxhs wrote: post #78
yesimahuman wrote: post #10

On Firefox it’s unusable for quick work (open, quickly manage emails, close). The interface is noticeably slower than the classic UI. It’s maddening. Not sure what I’m going to do when it switches over for our Google Apps account. Any alternatives people like?

Thunderbird is real fast.

came here to say that.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#188

Post by bassman9000 »

artwr wrote: post #137
bassman9000 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went to test Fastmail after some other poster suggested it. Granted, inbox is empty, but feels way faster that gmail, on par with basic gmail, with more functionality. No cache reload: 28 requests, 114KB, 2.45 seconds. With cache: 28 requests, 12KB, 2.65 seconds. Funny: UI seems ready after 1 second, but there's an eventsource request that dwarfs the rest in the waterfall, taking the rest of the time. Edit: playing a…

Thanks for the informative benchmark. I am (slowly) considering alternatives, are you also considering making the jump?

Strongly, yes. Fastmail has a help/blog post to help you migrate. I'm concerned about the large size of my gmail inbox (13+ year user), though. They mention actual emails import too, but haven't tested yet.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#189

Post by bassman9000 »

jcranmer wrote: post #115
bassman9000 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. This is insane. So I went to test it. 358 requests, 6.3MB, 20 seconds till full load. Compared to the standard, really old view ( https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en ): 14 requests, 25.3KB, 2 seconds. Edit: fans were spinning hard, so I opened the task manager: after CPU went down from ~90% tab is using 600-700MB, stable, with the dev console open, 400-…

... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB, which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received for several years."

There's an increased amount of crap being added, like the side menus.

And I have pretty much all behaviors (e.g. menu on hover) disabled.

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