
Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish? - aerovistae
For me it&#x27;s so unresponsive that I&#x27;m at a loss for words how google put this into production. I have a modern, new computer and modern, urban internet good enough for streaming 1080p on Twitch without interruption, but I can&#x27;t delete or archive an email anymore without waiting 4-6 seconds for it to complete the action.<p>What has your experience been like with it?<p>edit: Guess I&#x27;m not alone. I can only hope someone working at Google sees this post or cares. Maybe too much to hope for.
======
throwaway140
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 working, only works on
chrome, or some such nonsense! This is the norm!

Why? Promotion. You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place
unless you "launch" something big.

So what do you get when you add of all these perverse incentives? Nine
thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-three chat apps, and a never-ending chain
of redesigns and relaunches so some people can get promoted.

Do you know how many bugs you need to fix to get promoted? Infinity. No matter
how many you fix, it will never get you enough "impact" for promotion. Never.

How many useless redesigns do you need to launch to get promoted? ONE!

Extra fun: people internally usually warn about this shit, complain about it,
file bugs about shitty performance, etc. It is _ALL_ ignored. Most people
who've been here for over a few years have given up filing bugs even. Because
the reply is always the same: "you're not the target audience"!

And we all know it! We all do! Some quit when they realize it, others just
begin optimizing for promotion as opposed to optimizing for what is good for
the user or the company. And this is how you get new gmail, for example.

EDIT: replaced underscores with proper profanity as had been requested

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Classic: You get what you measure.

But years ago the same thing happened to me at Apple. I was fixing bugs in
every part of a major framework to help SnowLeopard ship only to get passed
over for a minor promotion because I wasn't "critical on any one project".

I thought it was especially ironic since SnowLeopard was supposed to be a
stability/performance release only to get massively delayed by people
"shipping" things like the Objective-C garbage collection that made XCode
unusable for months. The same stability/performance release that had a day-1
point release.

~~~
shittyadmin
Maintenance is thankless work - it's that way in just about every industry
around, short of total disaster no one is going to congratulate you for making
something work the way it was supposed to work.

~~~
therealdrag0
Personally I've had good reception of performance and security bug fixes at my
current job. Even got a private bonus from CTO for one. (Small-Medium company)

But I can see how that'd be the exception.

------
MiddleEndian
A 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.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
As soon as I got the update notification and couldn't say no, I quit Gmail.

The redesign is absolutely horrible, and just like OP, I find it unusably slow
(on a beasty Gaming PC).

I got Fastmail, and redirect my Gmail which will now only be used as a spam
address. Exactly the same as when I went Hotmail to Gmail and Hotmail because
my spam address.

The tech cycle continues.

~~~
MiddleEndian
My Google mail is already a personal domain I just manage through Google apps.
To be honest the main reason I keep it on Google apps is the six-ish people I
talk to exclusively through hangouts (and momentum).

If I do get forced to the new gmail web version I'll likely switch to a
desktop client or write my own client if I can't find a tolerable one.

~~~
victorkilo1
OK, here is the real shocker. I had to create an outlook account and get a
Office 365 sub for various reasons. I actually found the Outlook + Skype +
OneDrive combo more usable than their Google counterparts. If you had told me
this five years ago, I would have had you sectioned under the mental health
act

~~~
MiddleEndian
I don't discount that possibility, but I use hangouts to talk to specific
people who don't use any other PC-based chat. That's the downside of tying
your email address to your chat I suppose.

I've taken to using Windows Mail for my gmail usage half the time anyway now,
even though I'm still on the old web client.

------
iamwil
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!

I've now bookmarked the old "html gmail" just so I can compose emails in a
jiffy. I think they assume I leave a browser tab open for email. Not when it's
so heavy weight.

~~~
bassman9000
> 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](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,
400-500MB closed. 400MB to check my email.

~~~
jcranmer
... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't
take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message
headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to
consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB,
which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received
for several years."

~~~
jjeaff
They have to track your every mouse move, what you type, when you type, where
you hover your cursor, how long you took to type an email, who knows what
else. Extreme surveillance takes extreme resources.

------
crazygringo
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, 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.

~~~
userbinator
_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.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
That's correct. On the other hand, I see many people sheepishly accepting slow
page loads and overall unresponsiveness of today's web apps because - apart
from a few slim ones - the majority seems to be equally sluggish, loading tons
of JS, webfonts (before the page gets loaded!) and what have you. Many people
somehow got convinced that it has to be that way.

------
Guest9812398
It seems like almost everything Google related is sluggish. The new Google
AdSense, the new Google Analytics, the new Google DoubleClick for Publishers,
and to a lesser extent, the new Google Maps. These are all products I use that
perform worse now (on modern hardware) compared to a decade ago. I really
don't understand how this happens. Does no one at Google notice some of these
services literally taking 10 seconds to load simple pages?

~~~
arkitaip
They have invested so many billions in their pipeline and committed so much
head space that it's incredibly difficult to change their tech stack to
improve performance. Users suffer because of poor performance but at least
management can brag about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push
out production code, etc.

~~~
userbinator
_Users suffer because of poor performance but at least management can brag
about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push out production code,
etc._

I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the
last 5 years or so, and it's just as irritating to me --- especially when
resolving user-complaints take a backseat to improving whatever useless
metric-of-the-week the management have thought of.

It doesn't have to be "the customer is always right", but I've found that
companies are increasingly becoming more deliberately ignorant of user's
concerns and instead focusing on furthering their own agenda.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the
> last 5 years or so

It's much older, but previously you'd see it more in the desktop space.

As for the server, an interesting thing happened: the proprietary software
used to follow similar trend (I'm talking to you, big fat database vendors),
with some open-source projects behaving the same. But people are not stupid:
you realize you win by serving your clients fast and that very often speed is
more important than functionality. Hence the success of projects like Nginx or
Redis.

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Welcome to 2018, friend, where we have several orders of magnitude more
computing power and somehow everything is less responsive. It's all
accomplished through an advanced process called "Software Engineering".

~~~
bunderbunder
More specifically, sluggish websites seem to result from the popularity of
"responsive design".

~~~
NightlyDev
Responsive design isn't to blame at all. The "Javascript all the things"
approach is to blame.

~~~
jjeaff
If it was only JavaScript, we'd be fine. But it's a JavaScript framework,
built on some other JavaScript frameworks with tons of dependencies, then an
entire new dependency plugin for every little thing you need to do like check
if something "is an array".

------
userbinator
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/](http://mail.google.com/mail/h/) to get a
basic HTML version.

~~~
dredds
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.

~~~
sincerely
I can understand asking people to update their browser, for security
considerations.

~~~
dredds
My security, my choice. If i say no ('X') then they shouldn't keep nagging me.

~~~
dredds
Getting downvoted, so i'll add that i'm using a Chrome-based Chinese browser
(UC) so have no control over the Chrome version.

------
harshalizee
It's incredibly slow and to top it all the new redesign is maddeningly bad. I
have to zoom out to 90%-80% just to make it bearable. There is clearly no
separation between various sections in the fifty shades of grey that's become
their MO. This should never have passed the first line of review let alone be
in production. With all their new decisions with the Pixel 3, Chrome and now
Gmail, it's clear Google's list its edge.

------
yesimahuman
On Firefox it’s unusable for quick work (open, quickly manage emails, close).
The interface is noticeably slower than the classic UI. It’s maddening.

Not sure what I’m going to do when it switches over for our Google Apps
account. Any alternatives people like?

~~~
mshenfield
This exactly. On Firefox Nightly, time to first interaction for me is 30
seconds.

I've found myself going to gmail.com, searching for something, and then
waiting 30 seconds for "Loading..."to transform to "Something's not right".
I've just started doing all reading on the Android app.

It's still easier for me to write at my laptop than on my phone, so this
miserable experience happens to me multiple times a week. I've started to
deeply despise the webapp.

~~~
seba_dos1
Use an IMAP client.

~~~
mshenfield
That is a solution to my problem. Thanks for the tip.

------
esotericn
I don't use Gmail, but Google Maps seems to be getting slower and slower all
the time for me on some of my older boxes.

I imagine that it's just the classic case of developers having good machines,
and the market share factor meaning they just don't really have to care.

I develop on a 12 core processor. If I make something user facing, I have to
go out of my way to ensure that it's performant on other hardware; it's not
part of the standard build/tweak loop.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
>I imagine that it's just the classic case of developers having good machines.

But, like, that's ridiculous! Developers should be testing the performance of
their stuff, either by looking at system resources or by keeping some "crappy"
testing machines around. Preferably both.

I wonder what the environmental impact is of users upgrading their hardware in
order to run completely unoptimized stuff like this?

~~~
dingaling
> or by keeping some "crappy" testing machines around.

We used to do that at ${BIGCORP} until the CTO moved us to an equipment
leasing policy in place of buy-and-depreciate. Instead of being able to retain
the old machines for testing they went back to the lessor every three or five
years.

It used to be that most devs had a couple of old PCs under their desks for
hacking around on stuff, but that was no longer tolerated. The policy seemed
like a minor financial tweak to the C-suits but was actually quite destructive
to innovation.

------
snazz
Plenty of previous discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305366)
— you’re not alone

------
busterarm
I get drastically different performance using Google's services between
Firefox and Chrome.

I had instant responses in Chrome for Gmail, Chat/Hangouts, Calendar, etc.

In Firefox? 4-6 second wait for _every_ interaction.

And I don't think the fault is with Firefox here...

~~~
ndnxhs
There was a post recently about how YouTube uses depreciated web APIs and then
polyfills them to every browser that isn't chrome so YouTube loads slow on non
chrome browsers.

~~~
breakingcups
That's insane. Google's products have taken a nosedive in the past 5 years.

------
philliphaydon
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.

~~~
navs
As an outlook.com and gmail user, I have to say it's going through the same
crap as gmail. More features getting tacked on. I stopped using outlook.com's
web interface once they started throwing Skype in my face at every chance.

~~~
philliphaydon
There's skype on there too? My experience was.

\- Ah stupid MS login

\- Oh that loaded fast

\- _clicks email_ loads instantly on right hand side and can still see my
list.

\- Oh this is clean and fast!

I've been debating loading gmail into a desktop client now that the UI is so
sluggish for me. (for the first time since gmail came about) but as of
saturday, i'm wondering if I should try using my outlook email more.

------
captaindiego
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).

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

~~~
socratesque
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.

------
mjhayter
One setting I found that has made the new interface slightly more bearable is
turning off "Hover actions" under the General tab. It gets rid of that awful
box-shadow that makes scanning down the list difficult.

~~~
kup0
This made a surprising difference in the performance for me. Thanks for the
suggestion!

------
mrhappyunhappy
I can’t stand the new gmail to the point where I check my email only once a
day. Every time I open that interface I get enraged. I am a UX designer and
the new UI is a total clusterfuck - something you’d expect to fire someone
over. Big G really messed this one up and I suspect many feel this way. If
they have any sense left at all they’ll add the old view option back or revert
completely.

~~~
macp
Agreed! I vote for this.

It's not just an issue of speed. The new gmail design is very hard to
read/understand. Red-on-pink is not the best contrast choice. The icons feel
fuzzy without the button borders, are hard to decode, and are too tight
together.

Strangely, while the icons are all packed tightly, the email list wastes extra
space vertically, and requires extra scrolling. Not the best design choice.

The high-contrast theme brings gmail close to the classic design, but it does
not work well enough to make the icons more recognizable and recover the
wasted space in the email list.

~~~
joshuamorton
You can make the email list more compact, (and in fact it tells you as much
the first time you open the app).

------
maxxxxx
Isn't that how modern web design works? Take away features, move stuff around
randomly and make things slower?

Google has got really far away from their initial versions of GMail and Maps.
They used to be lean and right on and now they are just a bloated mess.

------
nstart
I get pretty frustrated with it. I work almost exclusively with shortcuts, and
after a while the interface decides to forget to respond to my commands.

Example - /,"is:unread to:me",Enter. Should search for unread mails to me.

On a regular basis if I move through five items rapidly and head into this
search, it just shows a blank screen inside the area where the mails should
be. Even hitting f5 won't resolve the issue at times. Ive actually stopped
browsing through mails on some other threads because of this issue because it
would take up too much time to keep debugging Gmail.

------
vanderZwan
I just checked uMatrix how many scripts are running. After blocking hangouts,
plus, play, notifications and whatever "ogs" stands for it got a bit snappier,
and it still works.

~~~
aagha
Can you provide a bit of detail on how you block them?

~~~
vanderZwan
Uhm, well, its just the basic way one would use uMatrix so nothing special.
It's an add-on that works by whitelisting instead of blacklisting, similar to
NoScript.

In this case I had it set up to allow all subdomains of google, so I opened
the panel and clicked to blacklist the subdomain that I didn't want.

EDIT: The only downside of this is that if I want to use Google Hangouts in
the same browser, it is now blocked, so I have to manually unblock it. But I
use Firefox as my main browser, yet reserve hangouts to Chromium anyway.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki)

------
anonuser123456
Wouldn't it be crazy if email were built on protocols so users could choose
their interface?

------
mrmondo
I was trying out GSuite last week and used the Google Admin console and had
the exact same experience.

You click on options then you wait 2-5 seconds for the menu to load or the
option to expand.

Coupled with the poor UX I'm surprised more people aren't complaining about
the time they spend managing these systems, it's as bad as Office365 but it's
damn close now.

------
alphaomegacode
I think what surprises a lot of people is that Google would take a premier
product like Gmail and make it slower and less user-friendly.

Even when you try to use the "basic HTML", they decided to not provide a lot
of simple features such as basic view customizations (e.g. standard, compact,
relaxed). I'm guessing that was done to make sure people use the new UI - so
it's use the slow UI or too bad for you.

Not sure much will change in terms of the new UI since people are more wedded
to their email addresses than say their choice of search engine or maps.

When I worked with them back in the day, there was a certain "take it or leave
it" attitude at times from some senior people about some decisions in
products.

This was not all the people and I'm not speaking about the present leadership
who I don't know, just that it was the case because back in the mid/late 2000s
with my experiences and people I knew via working relationships.

------
bennettfeely
Not only sluggish but I couldn't stand the custom font, it makes reading
paragraphs of text a headache.

~~~
goshx
Ah yes, I hate it!

------
WheelsAtLarge
Set Gmail to default to basic HTML. You'll be happy you did.

[https://smallbusiness.chron.com/make-gmail-display-mail-
basi...](https://smallbusiness.chron.com/make-gmail-display-mail-basic-
html-44852.html)

~~~
PopePompous
Yes, I've switched to the HTML version permanently, and I hope others do the
same. Maybe if Google sees enough people switching to HTML, they'll get an
idea of how popular their new version is.

~~~
aerovistae
that will never happen. gmail has over a billion users. we are really the
0.001% who would do something like that.

------
geggam
I use gmail over IMAP, performance on IMAP hasnt changed a bit.

~~~
socratesque
I'm surprised they still support IMAP.

~~~
Const-me
Probably because in some places, iOS is more than 50% of mobile users.

And globally, mobile devices have already overtaken PCs/laptops, years ago.

------
tzury
I haven’t come across better mail UI than Inbox.

Inbox got demoted, new Gmail got promoted.

If what I was told is true, then at Google, data beats opinions, that is, they
have data to back up those decisions.

Now, why am I not convinced this is the case over here?

~~~
spinchange
I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for the same reason,
but I too am unconvinced.

As one example/anecdotal aside: replacing a link to all mail from/to a contact
on mouseover of their name with....links to Google Keep, Hangouts, etc.
There's no way the use case data led to a change like this. I mean, how could
it?

------
grahamburger
It actually works great for me. Firefox Nightly on 2016 MacBook pro. Curious
why experiences differ so much - I wonder if it's the difference between folks
(like me) who leave the browser open always with Gmail in a pinned tab vs
people who load Gmail only as needed. Although that can't be it entirely,
because I restart Firefox roughly daily to apply nightly updates. Maybe some
plugin interference? I run ublock but that's about it.

------
ianai
I genuinely hate the gmail interface - mobile especially. Completely
unintuitive icons much of the time. Seems to do conversation threads poorly
too.

------
p1necone
Yup, noticeably much much slower than the old interface, while seemingly also
not changing functionality or layout at all. What was the point?

~~~
djrobstep
Technological/intellectual masturbation?

------
ydnaclementine
Old version is available in the gear if you're using corporate gmail

------
nailer
Hell yes. I've been a gmail user for 15 years and I can't use gmail in my
browser anymore.

For work, we migrated from Google apps to Fastmail.

But I still have 15 years of personal @gmail.com email and it's been my
address forever. I currently use my phone for personal email (even when I
don't want to) because the website no longer responds to input.

------
dirtylowprofile
I prefer using email clients than using the Gmail on web because of this
particular reason. Their web app is painfully slow.

------
dredds
Sent feedback during the test phase that it was unusable (hangs while
"loading...") on slower connections and average laptops. Still forced it on
us.

Killing G+. Google Search "mini games" annoying eyesore (Winter Olympic ones
crashed browser so switched to DuckDuckGo) Censorship in China. 20k Googlers
protesting. WTF?!!

------
jorblumesea
I 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.

~~~
xvector
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.

------
keyle
I've written about how bad it is, and I've given feedback, and I try to use
Gmail basic whenever possible now. That's how bad it is.

But Gmail basic doesn't support changing sender's address... and attachments
is a bit backwards, so I still have to stick with this monstrosity.

------
bit_4l
You're not alone. I was blaming on my internet connection for awhile, until I
found this post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095579)

Moved to ProtonMail for important conversations.

------
sj4nz
I have mostly stopped using Google Gmail because they still can't do something
simple like... I don't know... sort by sender? They keep changing the
interface, but they never seem to improve the utility.

------
spike021
I use the content filter tabs (Social, Promotions, etc.).

Gmail refuses to let me move to a tab and mark new emails as read just about
every time. It just hangs. I'll refresh and the same thing happens.

Multiple other issues as well.

------
ehead
Yes - I've since switched to the Apple email client.

------
matty22
The Gmail UI refresh is so bad that it's the final straw on the camel's back
to get me to swap to something else. I was already considering it just due to
privacy concerns, but I was sitting on that decision. The fact that it takes
30s for the page to load and another 30s to do something as simple as checking
the box beside an email and deleting it made my choice for me.

------
climb_stealth
What aggravated me most is that sometimes clicking on a button has no effect.
First I swapped to the HTML only version of gmail but found it too limited. I
have now been using Thunderbird for a week or two. It is not perfect, but it
actually works quite well. Plus you can have a little calendar view for the
day's events on the side.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
If it's like the new google sites, they're clearly off loading everything
possible to browser as JavaScript, making site slow, sluggish and
unresponsive. - I guess that's just the norm for the future web sites.
[https://sites.google.com](https://sites.google.com)

------
rsoto
My experience has been mixed. I do most of the work stuff on Chromium and the
UI is okay-ish, used to be better, but whatever.

However, the personal stuff I keep it for Firefox, and it's just as OP said:
4-6 seconds to complete an action and even when the UI has loaded, not all
icons are shown immediately.

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buboard
I am on slow connection the entire week and it is a pain in the butt. I m sick
and tired at looking at spinners and progressbars. It's not just gmail,
everything google ( i suspect material designed) is sluggish. Try adsense if
you want to ruin your day.

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SQL2219
Yes sluggish, even on google fiber.

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thrower123
It's unusable. I have gone back to a mix of the basic html version and a
desktop client.

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Figs
Yes. I switched to using the "Basic HTML" version by default. Either turn
JavaScript off and refresh the page once logged in, or click "Load basic html
(for slow connections)" while the loading animation plays to get to it.

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CarVac
I'm finding it much quicker in just about every way than the old UI, using
Firefox.

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Alex3917
I keep 6 gmail tabs pinned and I don't find it sluggish at all on my 2016
MacBook Pro. The only thing that's slow for me is how long the non-default
add-ons take to display after you load a message.

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bigfartchili
On top of the new gmail being extremely slow the new google Ads or AdWords is
so much worse. I have to run an ec2 instance at work in order to get just “ok”
speeds. This is with fiber optic internet...

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nyxtom
Yep I posted something similar earlier
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284264)

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oe
The archiving delay kills me. I used to archive an email and close the window
but not anymore. One would think it’s a single request to the back-end and the
UI could be updated after that.

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slouch
The only part of Gmail I need redesigned is the settings page. I thought,
"surely, this page from before the last redesign will finally get the
treatment it needs." I was wrong.

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alexozer
After the inbox debacle I decided I didn't want to use Gmail and am now a
happy Mailspring user. If it could just implement Google inbox's sweep
function, it would be perfect.

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reneherse
Yes! And the recent versions of Chrome on macOS are equally bad.

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zerof1l
That's why I switched to the simple HTML version of the Gmail. Not as fancy,
but it covers 90% of my needs. When I need fancy interface, I temporarily
switch to it.

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robabby
Yes I have definitely noticed the same sluggishness. Does anyone have any
resources or recommendations for transitioning off of Gmail and onto another
email provider?

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joevdwalt
The new gmail interface is just super busy and confusing and slow.

Spent my early morning disabling features just to curb info overload.

Google is turning into microsoft and microsoft into google.

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quickthrower2
Not really. I've been using it every day and not noticed the problems others
have. I have a fairly old refurb PC. Notwithstanding the page loading time.

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bisanthe
yesterday i was writing email with my new bluetooth keyboard and i realised
that, words are appearing on screen after 5 seconds delay. first i blamed new
keyboard and replaced batteries. then blamed chrome and checked memory/cpu
usage all was fine. then i wrote email in vi and paste into gmail, even select
old text and paste was extremely slow. thanks i saw this post, you are right
it is almost unusable.

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goshx
Yes, I have reported it to them and never heard back.

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COil
Noticed that too. Even with a powerful computer. The tags also take times to
be automatically by associated to email you've just sent.

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verelo
Ugh, i've been delaying switching from Inbox. Still holding out hope that
someone at Google lets that thing live somehow...

~~~
elyobo
I avoided inbox on the web for the same reason as people are complaining about
Gmail here; the mobile app is nice, but the web version was borderline
unusable for me.

~~~
xvector
I felt similarly but the innovation Inbox brought to email was just too big to
ignore. It was a new paradigm on how to use e-mail.

Killing Inbox is just another terrible decisions in a string of terrible
decisions coming from Google. "Eh, only had a few million users anyways, who
cares? What's product support? Everyone's a beta tester!"

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technofiend
Seriously considering going back to imap+MH.

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Fellshard
Inbox does this now, as well. Half the time I open the page, I cannot even use
it, despite seeing the emails loaded.

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mouffle
If you have something liké Adblock or UblockOrigin try to disable thème for
Gmail, for me If had a speed boost.

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make3
.... it works perfectly fine for me

~~~
markmark
Just had a click around to confirm, Chrome on a mac, everything is
instantaneous. I thought they must have been heavily pre-loading it opened
messages so quickly, but I checked the network tab and it's making requests.

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karan_dev
Yes. Me. It is slow. And sometimes mail doesn't appear. I have to refresh the
page.

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DonnyV
It probably uses Angular. :-0

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unstatusthequo
All snark aside... You get what you pay for. I am slowly moving away from
Google services. Paying in some cases reduces functions you might be used to,
but also introduces freedom of ownership (well, maybe). But overall we are
spoiled and I prefer using non mainstream services now.

~~~
DoctorOetker
imagine a world where user experience is modulated proportional to revenue
generated through the user, to subtextually train us to spend money in the way
they like.

>You get what you pay for

Could you try disabling google ads, buying a couple of products and report
back if it improves the user experience?

~~~
mbrumlow
Its just too easy to setup your own mail server these days.

I moved to my own domain, and use emacs + mu4e and have had zero problems. I
do still have my old gmail address forwarded to my mail server and can reply
when needed.

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pier25
I mostly hate the design and UX.

Also the fact that I can’t go back to the previous version.

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sova
"HTML (for slow connections)" applies to all equally! Finally, an egalitarian
experience! And they said communism could never work.

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bbimbop
How about that the back button takes you off site instead of back one email?

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jlarocco
No, I don't use GMail.

Fastmail is great, though.

