Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by seba_dos1 » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

hluska wrote: post #74

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...

I liked previous Gmail versions. I could see why people may dislike them, but they were fine for me and worked well (especially after setting up a dark theme and compact view density). Now it's so unbearably slow and ugly that I switched to HTML view and consider it an improvement.

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

#92

Post by vemv » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

hello_asdf wrote: post #83

vemv wrote: post #34

I hope they're not removing the revert option for Classic UI :( Having an API unable to support two clients (Classic and New) would be embarassing from an engineering POV. And from an UX POV, it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users. There are all kind of reasons why a given person might prefer UI a to b ( a being older having nothing t…

I don't have revert option anymore.

I seem to still have it given I use G Suite.

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

#93

Post by transpy » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

When I realized I can't go back to normal UI, I immediatly downloaded Thunderbird and went back to e-mail clients. I won't bother with the new gmail. Fonts look horrible, it is slower and in the end there is less information density.

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

#94

Post by MrMember » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

hello_asdf wrote: post #83

vemv wrote: post #34

I hope they're not removing the revert option for Classic UI :( Having an API unable to support two clients (Classic and New) would be embarassing from an engineering POV. And from an UX POV, it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users. There are all kind of reasons why a given person might prefer UI a to b ( a being older having nothing t…

I don't have revert option anymore.

Same, I reverted to the old UI a month ago or so but yesterday I was forced back to the new UI with no option to revert again.

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

#95

Post by srean » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

I think we have come a full circle.

I remember a time when search engines, web based emails and other such things were so painfully slow and cluttered. Then there was this upstart with a funny name and single box to type in your search term. I switched because the air was fresh there.

There used to be a lot of noise about why don't they use that hot new eye candy, much like we have the same question asked about HN. Eventually they won.

On the lookout for the next plot of fresh air.

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

#96

Post by J_cst » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

For me (I'm in Italy) the best part was the request: " would you like to switch now or in two weeks?". I use the same with my kids: "would you like one portion of broccoli or two portions?". This approach gives the perception of being able to choose.

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

#97

Post by seba_dos1 » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

dangwu wrote: post #67

thrower123 wrote: post #27

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

In case of basic HTML - yes. In case of new update - it's pretty CPU intensive (and GPU too, at least on my laptop's Haswell iGPU with hidpi screen).

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

#98

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

undoware wrote: post #80

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 casu…

So basically, "wait for Moore's law to catch up", web edition?

Your network connection might be aggravating the issue, as quick look at the Network tab show it issues a metric crapton of small requests (on my machine lasting for more than a minute after opening the page). But I do have a decent enough pipe, and still get ridiculous load time + performance problems. And so seem other people commenting here about performance.

The problems of today's SPAs are mostly self-inflicted.

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

#99

Post by nicoburns » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #29

I do consulting work and am regularly given an account on the company's email system. More recently they're using GMail underneath, so now I've apparently got a dozen accounts on GMail. And GMail, bless it, when I login through the company's system clocks me through to a "Choose which account" system. My reaction is to open a new tab and login again, and it usually takes me straight through to the actual email withou…

Firefox's "container tabs" feature is a blessing for these kinds of situations.

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

#100

Post by rurp » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

eiieirurjdndjd wrote: post #39

sp332 wrote: 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…

> Unfortunately we can’t all have a custom UI written exactly to our specifications.

This isn't what most people are asking for though, they just want Google to not make the UX worse. Increasing the page load time and making a bunch of styling changes for no appreciable benefit makes the app worse, not better. If a lot of people are wishing the dev team had just done nothing, it's probably a sign that the changes aren't warranted.