Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 283 posts

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

#71

Post by dewey »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38
dewey wrote: post #10

As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to back this up.

Where would they get that data? Users are given no way to voice negative feedback. If most users are like most non-techies I know, I assure you, they do care. There's just nothing they can do, beyond telling first couple people they encounter that they hate the new UI, and carrying on with their lives. Because what are they going to do? Move 10 years of their e-mail history to Microsoft and IM/phone 500 people about…

They could A/B test and show some users a form to give their feedback.

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

#72

Post by codedokode »

I remember earlier Google switched Doubleclick for Publishers to UI made with Dart and material design. It is awful and looks like a product of some low quality outsourcing company. It is slow to load (needs to load about 10 Mb to start), it works very slowly, all animations are laggy.

I checked with Developer Tools, didnt't see anything resembling Dart in Gmail (and it is not as slow as DFP). But there is 2.8 Mb JS file and 1.3 Mb CSS file (loaded 3 times, don't know why). I am not sure if this is really necessary to display a list of 20 newest emails. Also, a hangouts widget loads additional 600 kb of JS and 600 Kb of CSS.

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

#73

Post by seba_dos1 »

forgot-my-pw wrote: post #13
dewey wrote: post #10

As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to back this up.

There's always resistance to new changes, but if we never change, we can't innovate. - just a user

I'm usually an early adopter type. There are many new cool things that make me excited even if they're unstable and on bleeding edge. There are also new unusable things that make me want to go back. When I consider something to fit into the second group, that doesn't mean I'm opposed to changes and innovation.

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

#74

Post by hluska »

At the risk of saying something unpopular, I like the new Gmail. I liked the previous Gmail too, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

It is slightly slower, but I like the look and enjoy working in it.

While I dream of doing it, I think it would be hard to PM something as popular as Gmail. Once you reach a nine figure user count, any change you make will be met with millions of unhappy people...

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

#75

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

kroltan wrote: 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!

Unless you work for a company that disables POP/IMAP, for allegedly security reasons.

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

#76

Post by mercenario »

hawski wrote: post #18

I don't mind the look that much, but it's painfully slow. When an application gains a animated splash screen I know that it's time has come. I'm using a Chromebook, so in a way a Google blessed device and it's annoyingly slow. I'm switching to basic HTML view. If it will disappear I will get off gmail for good.

To me it is annoying slow to open gmail, but the navigation is mostly very fast.

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

#77

Post by kvdr »

Also, the new (now a few months old) Google finance UI as well.

The charts are almost always broken, clicking on 1M will not show today's levels.

And earlier I could just put a /FB or /GOOG in the URL to get to that page instantly, now the URL is some 100s of long char string (sorry, I am from C/C++ world so dont know the exact terms for these)

Then there is the news events map to the chart, used to be cool to see what caused the dip/bump, but not there now..

I have since moved to Yahoo finance, but that has too much ads and autoplay videos.

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

#78

Post by save_ferris »

hawski wrote: post #18

I don't mind the look that much, but it's painfully slow. When an application gains a animated splash screen I know that it's time has come. I'm using a Chromebook, so in a way a Google blessed device and it's annoyingly slow. I'm switching to basic HTML view. If it will disappear I will get off gmail for good.

it's especially bad on Firefox. With that, and the fact that Google is killing Inbox, it feels like time to look for alternatives.

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

#79

Post by commoner »

copperx wrote: post #48

Tangential, but does anybody here have a email app recommendation for Linux? Something that can replace browsing Gmail on a browser?

Thunderbird is the most popular choice and supports add-ons.

For comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Outlook, Evolution is well-integrated into GNOME, while KMail (part of Kontact) is well-integrated into KDE.

Alternatively, Geary (GTK+ 3 based, adopted by GNOME), Pantheon Mail (Elementary's fork of Geary), Claws Mail (lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Sylpheed (lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Trojitá (lightweight Qt 5 based), Kube (Qt 5 based, integrates with Kolab Now), and Mutt (text-based) also work on Linux.

All of these applications are free and open-source, and some of them also work on Windows and macOS.

Thunderbird: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Evolution: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/

KMail: https://www.kde.org/applications/internet/kmail/

Geary: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

Pantheon Mail: https://github.com/elementary/mail

Claws Mail: https://www.claws-mail.org/

Sylpheed: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

Trojitá: http://trojita.flaska.net/

Kube: https://kube-project.com/

Mutt: http://www.mutt.org/

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

#80

Post by undoware »

The new UX is beautiful, well-thought-out, consistent, and sporadically hangs for tens of seconds at a stretch on my 2017 16gb i7 MBP in both Chrome and Firefox.

My theory is that network interruptions during pageload cause the balance of these problems, as one of the environments I'm most frequently in has low-quality wifi. Haven't had time to do profiling or even so much as crack Devtools on the problem, but I casually imagine that they are dynamically loading a lot of libs, so a broken pipe or a dropped packet or two would certainly immobilize the UI until TCP/HTTP had gone through the dance of either resending the packets in question, or teardown/setup.

That said, the previous edition of Gmail -- possibly because it was lighter weight -- rarely misbehaved this way.

I believe we are seeing with gmail some of the current limits of the SPA designs. So it's not Google's fault, per se, and we should expect more and more sites to begin to evince the same drawbacks as the SPA model ineluctably takes over. (It really is superior.)

Eventually, problems in SPA will be resolved by improvements at the backend, on the wire, or by way of improvements to webpack, or the browsers themselves.

Post reply on HN