Inbox does this now, as well. Half the time I open the page, I cannot even use it, despite seeing the emails loaded.
Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
91–100 of 222 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#92I dislike Google's preference for making their experiences optimal on chrome. Gmail and youtube both seem to run faster on Chrome. It feels very monopolistic that their services run best with each other and poorly on the competition. It's probably not intentional, but very frustrating.
This is entirely intentional. Google has no incentive to make their services run optimally on anything other than Chrome, for that would slow Chrome adoption.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#93Not 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.
Expecting people to revert to a 25 year old text version, and repeatedly demanding users to upgrade their Chrome version from a 6 month old one shouldn't be necessary either.
I think the best course of action is for someone in the Chrome extension space to create an extension that adds minimal functionality to the basic HTML version, like simple dragging and dropping of emails into labels. I use an enhancement suite for Reddit and HN - I'd gladly use one on basic GMail.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#94I hope it was the result of plenty of well-intentioned individual business decisions, such as Gmail now working offline in a first-class way, and relying on (presumably more complex and slower) web technologies to make that happen. I mean, the new Gmail is supporting a lot more features (including ones brought from Inbox), so a total architecture rewrite was probably necessary.
BUT -- at the same time it's super-sad, because Google (search) felt like it was one of the biggest forces pushing for faster page loads, publicly saying it would downrank sites that loaded slowly, and pushing things like SPDY -- and think of what Chrome did for JavaScript performance. And the old Gmail was so fast, so blazingly fast, loading instantly and keyboard shortcuts felt akin to using a terminal.
So the new, slow-as-molasses Gmail feels like the end of an era, a couple years after the same thing happened to Maps. Gmail is no longer about clever code that executes lightning fast in the browser, now it feels just like another piece of bloated enterprise software. :( They probably had the right business reasons to make Gmail more enterprise-friendly... but it still feels so sad as a programmer and as a user.
RIP fast Gmail.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#95Yes. 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!…
> 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-…
25.3KB, 2 seconds
That's what the size of a webmail app should be measured in --- kilobytes, not megabytes.
A megabyte of code is a lot, and I'd guess a lot of developers just don't have the intuition of how much that is; to put it into perspective, this is an entire operating system in 1.44MB: http://menuetos.net/
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
How, exactly..?
Possibly they are tracking our mouse movements (such is the feeling that their 'responsive design' gives me)
On my dinky refurbished laptop, it feels like every element in the new interface has some sort of :hover/Javascript combination and that's where the slug starts.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#97Am a googler (hence throwaway account) & I can easily tell you why this shit keeps happening! Google featureless ZERO penalties for fucking shit up! Zero! Do you know what the people who wasted two years on Allo got after it was canned? Nothing! Some of them actually got promoted! Google GREATLY encourages "launches" - releasing something publicly. And keep in mind - no penalties if the shit is half baked, not workin…
Ah! I often wonder, how and why does Google decide to change the UI to well established products like Gmail? It's certain to annoy veteran users, so I'm particularly puzzled when the decide to shake things up, UX wise, for no apparent usability or feature gain. I suppose your post is at least partly an explanation.
In this particular case, Gmail surely needed to be brought in line with Material Design (as has been happening to all Google apps, like Keep last week)... and the fact it now works offline (in its native interface, not the old kludge) is the biggest usability/feature gain (pretty huge, really).
They've actually been adding a ton of new features over the past year, especially with Inbox functionality being merged in.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#98A week or two after reverting back to the usable gmail, Google notified me they would switch my Google apps mail to the new gmail in a popup on the corner. It presented me with two options: Now, Delay One Week. Instead of choosing one, I adblocked the notification. Two weeks later I'm still on the old gmail that responds to clicks. Hoping it never changes.
Google talking to us like trying to trick a toddler. "Do you want to clean your room now, or after dinner?"
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#99Am a googler (hence throwaway account) & I can easily tell you why this shit keeps happening! Google featureless ZERO penalties for fucking shit up! Zero! Do you know what the people who wasted two years on Allo got after it was canned? Nothing! Some of them actually got promoted! Google GREATLY encourages "launches" - releasing something publicly. And keep in mind - no penalties if the shit is half baked, not workin…
Reminds me of this account: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
#100Am a googler (hence throwaway account) & I can easily tell you why this shit keeps happening! Google featureless ZERO penalties for fucking shit up! Zero! Do you know what the people who wasted two years on Allo got after it was canned? Nothing! Some of them actually got promoted! Google GREATLY encourages "launches" - releasing something publicly. And keep in mind - no penalties if the shit is half baked, not workin…
I just want to say, this is my favorite HN comment edit ever. :)