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Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#62

I have one browser tab that hasn't been refreshed since before this travesty was dropped. I'm going to try to keep that one going as long as possible... The unnecessary animations irk me. I'm clocking 5-10 seconds to load and render my inbox, on a quad-core i7 with oodles of RAM and a fat network pipe. Whereas the basic view loads in 700 ms...

Save all of the assets that are loaded? I suspect that if you published your asset bundle, others would figure out the greasemonkey script to let you just keep that UI until they change their APIs. :)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#63
I hate to be asking, but... what has changed exactly?

As one who has only ever used Gmail with a mail client, I'm not seeing any obvious differences since the last time I had to log into the web interface to set a few rules, except an unusually colorful Compose button - which might have been there for a while for all I know.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#64
post #31

Get Thunderbird (or any other standalone email app). Extremely traditional UI, and better responsiveness due to no frill JS and no tracking. Bonus, even read your emails offline! Innovation!

I've been using Thunderbird on desktops and laptops, and K9 mail on Android, for years. Works fine. All you need is an IMAP server. Mine is hosted by Sonic and comes with my DSL service.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#66
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using GMail since 2004 and I'm not having any trouble, even in Firefox.

Same. I’m actually at google but I’m not going to tell the gmail team about this post because 1. I don’t agree with it, and 2. Gmail team is already painfully aware that any given change will be unappealing to a subset of users. 3. They are probably already here, taking note, considering. Unfortunately we can’t all have a custom UI written exactly to our specifications. Gmail team has to try to do what they think is…

> Gmail team has to try to do what they think is best for most users.

I would love if Gmail team went forward and shared a bit about how they get data on what's best for most users. This would probably alleviate many complaints, by letting complainers (like me) know how dissimilar they are to majority of users.

> For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox,

Given the state of browser extension market, this is inviting users to selfpwn.

> or you can write your own userscript

Isn't this against the TOS? Even if it isn't, this solves the problem only for couple frustrated users with enough knowledge and too much time on their hands.

> or use an IMAP client.

Fortunately, yes, for now. I hope Google doesn't decide to abandon IMAP.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#67

I have one browser tab that hasn't been refreshed since before this travesty was dropped. I'm going to try to keep that one going as long as possible... The unnecessary animations irk me. I'm clocking 5-10 seconds to load and render my inbox, on a quad-core i7 with oodles of RAM and a fat network pipe. Whereas the basic view loads in 700 ms...

I would assume that a huge majority of the load time is fetching data from Google's servers - not a CPU or memory intensive operation

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#68
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable javascript and switch to basic html version. Personally basic html is the only reason I still tolerate gmail.

I tried to do that. It is faster, but the font choice and color choice is awful. If you have a lot of e-mail, it's so hard to discern threads and read subjects. I feel like being forced to choose between two bad versions of GMail.

Could this be fixed for you with userstyles? It's not a proper solution, but basic HTML should be amendable to some quick quality-of-life styling.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#70
Can someone on the new UI tell me how to get the calendar widget in the sidebar on the left? (below "Inbox", "Sent", "More", etc)

I'm using an item from "Labs":

> Google Calendar gadget > by Ben K and Garry B

But Labs is gone in the new UI and this gadget isn't available under any of the new areas.

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