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Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#101

I 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,…

and think of what Chrome did for JavaScript performance

I think that's partly what contributed to this slowdown --- faster JS execution to a browser is basically like faster hardware to a native app, thus reducing the impetus to optimise the JS code itself. Imagine if hardware wasn't getting any faster (we're close to that already) and browsers still used regular intepretive JS execution like IE6 instead of JIT'ing. If browsers don't execute JS any faster, then web app developers would have to do a lot more optimising to get even acceptable performance, and perhaps we'd see some more interesting tricks and knowledge develop.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#102

Am 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…

Looks like my job at the IT service company has a similarity with Google. We cared a lot about our clients when we were small.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#103
I find it pretty sluggish. On Saturday I had to login to outlook for the first time in maybe 2/3 years. Wow the outlook ui from MS is awesome now. For me it was supe... ok ok ok. The login experience from MS still sucks donkey cock. I don’t know if they will ever fix that. But if you get past the terrible login experience. Man outlook is Super quick and clean. I switched back to gmail and i doesn’t look as good and it’s slow. Click things and wait.... gmail experience gone down hill.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#105

Yes I have had equal experiences. It has directly lead me to begin switching to Fastmail on my own domain because I'm tired of this nonsense (along with their constant nagging to switch to the new version or chrome).

Already switched to Fastmail, which has been excellent. It's nice to have successfully moved something off Google.

I did a small inventory of my online accounts the other day and got surprised by how little I depend on Google. A few years ago I figured Google was just a necessity of living (online) these days.

I first migrated to Fastmail a couple years ago, mainly to just have more control and use my own domain etc. Contacts and calendar shortly followed.

I switched to iPhone last year, not because Android is bad or anything, it's just what I had had for a long time and I wanted to try something else. No regrets there.

I switched to Chrome many years ago because it just worked better than other browsers, but recently I went back to try Firefox and it's really good now.

I never really used cloud storage.. (Photos/Drive)

Google is still the vastly better choice for Search, hands down. But just for the hell of it I decided to stick with DuckDuckGo and it's good enough for most things. Only occasionally do I head over to Google to get better results. It's not optimal, but I can live with that.

Google also has very good store/location info etc in Maps, and the photos to go with it. Apple's maps is far from the joke it used to be, but when you just want to get info on a store or something and you get redirected to TripAdvisor, that's a huge bummer.

Finally Youtube, there's just no competition out there.

All in all, of course Google has a presence in my online activity, but it's not the end-all be-all internet hub I thought it was.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#106
post #43

Yes. 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-…

Jeez, you weren't kidding. ~2.5MB on Chrome and ~5.5MB on FF transferred, which uncompresses to >20MB and takes around 20 seconds to become responsive.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#107

Not 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.

I just tried /mail/h in https and got redirected back to the new version. If it does work in http then alas, I don't want the old design back that badly.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?

#109

Am 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…

Sounds like Google has become just another big company.
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