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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

#182
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please refrain from self judging what your response may be or may not be on HN. Just state what you think. I urge you to read FAQ on HN etiquette.

I have read the FAQ. The first item is to be civil and avoid snark. The third item is to assume good faith. You've responded to the worst possible interpretation of what I said. I can assure you that I wasn't prejudging how people would respond to me because frankly, when I worry about those things, my writing goes to hell. Instead, I was trying to be friendly and poke fun of myself.

I am specifically referring to comments such as "I am going to get downvoted but I believe in X". Instead, just say "I believe in X".

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

#183

Here's how I had been using the old Gmail UI or HTML view for several years now. Simply login to your Gmail account. You should see a URL similar to https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/.. . in your browser address bar, just simply change the mu to h and hit enter. You will be taken to the old UI or html view.

I don't have "mu", only "u" and changing it to "h" only gives me the old html interface. I can do the same in the settings. I had the option to switch back to "classic" a couple of days back, but now it's gone.

Changing mu to h works totally fine for me. You can even change from mu to x but I think x is for mobile only. Just to clear any confussion, I hope the classic interface you are talking about is same as the basic html view. You can switch between standard view and basic html view from the buttom of the page. There are links there. But here's a link from Google so try this: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui

Make sure you are logged in before clicking on the link above. Let me know if I can still help.

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

#184

Two things: First, I myself miss the Q shortcut in Google Calendar, gone after the redesign. Second, I know for a fact that there are plenty of Google employees here. It is funny to see the radio silence. Somewhere within Google there is an email thread generating the HR compliant reply for this thread.

Googler here - I refrain from commenting on any Google related threads. I have my own pro-Google biases having seen internally on how the company works and how decisions get made here. And most of the people on HN have their own biases against Google without having that context. I don't see myself being part of any constructive discussion related to Google here so I like to not waste my time. Also, I don't want to say anything silly and get that taken out of context.

On GMail - I like the update. I find it better than the earlier UI. I use it work, I use it at home and I haven't noticed any slowness myself even when I am not on the Google network.

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

#185

Is it really that bad...? It looks about the same as the old with a material coat of paint.

The hover effects are atrocious.

What do you use mouse for? Best feature of GMail is keyboard navigation.

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

#186
I get constant UI freezes on Gmail (very alike to those I get on reddit), not sure if it's because of the adblocking software or because I'm using Firefox.

On the other hand, youtube works flawlessly. It's mindblowing what is possible when a company has the resources to optimize their software.

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

#187
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but where? There are not that much email providers that will live forever and won't change your UX and have mobile apps, and... and...

Well, if you don't want to switch providers, you can just use Thunderbird or your client of choice to access your inbox with a UI that you can trust won't change drastically.

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

#188

In addition to everything else, they've eliminated the different colored stars & icons. I liked those and used them to highlight mails I wanted to get back to. Now there's only starred and unstarred. (Be careful how you use 'important', as Google tries to learn from that and gets it wrong.)

They have? Doesn't seem so in my account. I've been using the green tick, red exclamation mark & co. for the better part of a decade since they've been in Labs. They still work for me. Should I be worried?

I see them as well.

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

#189
post #57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed so much, don't Google engineers have this same issue switching between work and personal e-mail or is Gmail not used internally?

Dogfooding doesn't work in large corporations.

Care to elaborate?

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

#190
Out of curiosity, I got gmail over to the basic HTML view.

Hard refresh of the page has it returning all my emails within 680ms at which point I can click on stuff.

For some reason there's a bit of a delay on the favicon, but even then that's all loaded and usable in With the new UI I can sort of do something around the 15 second mark, it becomes completely useable by 30 seconds, but there's still a bunch of stuff happening over the network. It finally got quiet around the 1 1/2 minute mark.

This is absolutely nuts.

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