
Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful - lenova
Looks like Google is rolling out the new Gmail UI to users, and removing the option to revert back to Classic UI.<p>The new UI is painful to look at, to be honest. Anyone from Google here want to mention to the Gmail team that the new UI is going to chase long-term users like myself off the platform?
======
hawski
I don't mind the look that much, but it's painfully slow. When an application
gains a animated splash screen I know that it's time has come. I'm using a
Chromebook, so in a way a Google blessed device and it's annoyingly slow. I'm
switching to basic HTML view. If it will disappear I will get off gmail for
good.

~~~
mrbonner
I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM and a core i5. The experience using Firefox
with the new Gmail UI with this laptop is nothing but sluggish. I have to
switch back to the old UI. I am not sure what I would do after Google takes
away the old UI. What the hell is going on at Google?

~~~
PurpleRamen
> What the hell is going on at Google?

Iterations are going on. There is a school of thought that believes any kind
of movement is progress. May it movement into good or bad direction. Thats why
companys regulary rehaul their apps, the design and corperate identity. It
always end with some people becoming unhappy, but hopefully more people being
happy.

~~~
peatmoss
Change for change’s sake. I feel like F/OSS has a potential advantage here in
being able to take the time to build durable, long-lived, stable software.

The web-everything world we live in right now has led to a cambrian explosion
in new UI metaphors and visual design. I can only hope at some point we all
wake up and decide that GNUMail running on GNU Hurd has gotten really stable,
and that maybe we should all just re-adopt open protocols and native apps.

------
nieksand
Google web UX has gotten horrific.

I used to visit Google News multiple times per day. Then the UX went to hell
there too. Each iteration became worse. After the latest changes, it became so
unbearably hideous and clunky that I couldn't stand it anymore. I got mad
every time I loaded the site. But years of keyboard memory still had me typing
in the URL constantly, getting mad every time it loaded up. I finally black
holed it in /etc/hosts to break the habit.

Gmail is in a similar state now. The new UI is hideous and clunky. And on the
engineering side, it takes multiple seconds to load up. I thought Googlers
were supposed to be known for their engineering competence?

Calendar? Bleh. It's still in a tolerable state, but visually the previous
release was easier to work with.

Bring back contrast. Bring back visual dividers. Stop with the clown buttons
like the mega "Compose"... these are tools we use for years and we had our
first-run experiences over a decade ago.

Fire whoever is driving your god awful UX on web.

~~~
reeeprgenx
UX Pro here. Google pays senior UX folks an average $160,000 they have
"degrees" from third rate Unis like Stanford and Cal Poly tech. How dumb can
they be? Do you think they will ever make any money?

~~~
phnk
Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct:
Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places.

That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run
counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and
spread out).

~~~
dave333
UX will eventually become fully personalized to the user's preference rather
than the latest fashion vaguely branded to the site owner. If they could
figure out how to personalize the UX as well as they personalize ads...

------
babuskov
In don't mind the way it looks, I can live with that. But it's sooo slow. Much
slower that previous interface. It loads slow and it works slow. Switching
between inbox and another folder use to be instantaneous, now I actually have
to wait. Opening messages, deleting, everything is slow.

And it looks like they removed the option to turn Undo off, so now I have to
wait 5 seconds to my message to actually be sent.

I'm so used to Google products being fast and feeling almost like a desktop
application. This new interface feels like a web app from 2000's. Makes me
want to go back to using Thunderbird for mail.

~~~
maimeowmeow
You cant keep tons of developers to make simple websites. Got to make things
complex for job security for all levels.

------
J_cst
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.

~~~
colanderman
Patronizing dialogues like these just underscore the disdain Google shows for
its users.

Treat users like adults; respect them. If you (UI designer) think you know
better: you don't, you're just cocky. If you can't think of another way to get
users to accept your new design: it's probably because it sucks, and you
shouldn't have made something no-one asked for in the first place.

(Wait, are we talking about GMail, or Windows 10?)

------
srean
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.

~~~
Twirrim
I remember discussing with people about how significant some of Google's
changes would be to their overall bandwidth and server needs. They used to
periodically try tweak the design of their already fairly minimal landing page
and shave several kilobytes off it. Back in those days even that small change
would have been significant.

These days they just don't seem to care any more.

------
thrower123
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...

~~~
thrower123
By the time the new UI has loaded in and stopped churning, I'm up to 225
requests, pulling down over 5mb. Most of these seem to be tiny pngs for button
icons... Why aren't these spritesheeted?

Basic view is 9 requests for 24 kb...

~~~
Too
Wasn't http2 supposed to solve this?

------
ThrustVectoring
The new Gmail UI handles attachments differently: when you receive an email
with an attachment, a summary of the attachment gets put in underneath the
title of the email.

The problem with this is that this is done dynamically on load, and there's a
delay. So you can be scrolling through old emails, and then suddenly where
everything is on the screen changes because new content finished loading in
the middle of what you were looking at.

Plus it makes the height of emails inconsistent, which is significantly harder
to parse visually.

It's kind of a small thing, but it honestly should not have passed UI review
processes at all. Don't fucking load new content in the middle of what people
are interacting with. It's 101 level stuff here.

Edit: apparently there's a setting for "Default", "Comfortable", or "Compact",
and that email account was on "Default" but should've been on "Compact", which
is way better.

------
orliesaurus
"The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, had a rule: every interaction should be
faster than 100ms. Why? Because 100ms is the threshold where interactions feel
instantaneous"

Took this from a company's website [0] who is trying to reinvent an email
client. I have to agree, the new Gmail experience is definitely not something
its original creator would be very proud of!

[0] [https://superhuman.com](https://superhuman.com)

------
ColinWright
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
without repeating the request for credentials.

The whole thing feels clunky, slow, and confused underneath. I don't much care
about the look, that comes and goes, fashions change, but the experience as a
whole has become painful.

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

~~~
zzzcpan
Dogfooding doesn't work in large corporations.

~~~
zbentley
Care to elaborate?

~~~
aesh2Xa1
It's an idiomatic term. It means to use the thing you produce yourself. So
when, in the case of Gmail, it is slow and painful to use for yourself, you
will fix it.

~~~
vickychijwani
I think the question wasn't "what is dogfooding" but rather "why do you say
dogfooding doesn't work at large cos?"

------
throwaway43298
Xoogler here, but I guarantee:

1) This conversation (and complaints) already happened, repeatedly and in-
depth, months ago on various internal lists

2) The response - the Decision is made, you're change averse/not a
representative user

3) Whichever PMs/leads/designers involved had an OKR to do Something, so
Something had to be done

~~~
igetspam
I do not miss those days. "You're change averse" was the most common
accusation made against anyone who disagreed with changes. Change for the sake
of change is rarely a good starting point but that never mattered. The web
teams would come up with new and shiny way to do things and everyone would
have to jump through hoops to get their properties updated. I'll never forget
when PDB was replaced with P. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it and
neither could most engineers I knew but hey, at least it was different.

------
btkramer9
My biggest complaint is that everything takes longer. Loading the page,
searching, etc. Everything feels slower.

~~~
zzzcpan
Disable javascript and switch to basic html version. Personally basic html is
the only reason I still tolerate gmail.

~~~
babuskov
I tried to do that. It is faster, but the font choice and color choice is
awful. If you have a lot of e-mail, it's so hard to discern threads and read
subjects.

I feel like being forced to choose between two bad versions of GMail.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Could this be fixed for you with userstyles? It's not a proper solution, but
basic HTML should be amendable to some quick quality-of-life styling.

~~~
mrieck
There are no tabs in basic HTML view. That pretty much makes it unusable to
me.

------
kroltan
Get Thunderbird (or any other standalone email app). Extremely traditional UI,
and better responsiveness due to no frill JS and no tracking.

Bonus, even read your emails offline!

<s>Innovation!</s>

~~~
Animats
I've been using Thunderbird on desktops and laptops, and K9 mail on Android,
for years. Works fine. All you need is an IMAP server. Mine is hosted by Sonic
and comes with my DSL service.

~~~
colanderman
I really wish I could recommend K9 to anyone, but the search functionality is
beyond broken. (I used to use it for FastMail because their own app loads
oxymoronically slowly, but I just couldn't deal with the broken search
functionality.) Have you found a way to work around this?

------
vemv
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 to do).

As you reach more humans, you have to embrace diversity. The views from a
handful of hipster designers in SF shouldn't irreversibly impact how the rest
of the world interacts with their computers.

~~~
hello_asdf
I don't have revert option anymore.

~~~
MrMember
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.

~~~
maimeowmeow
Reload and quickly click html for the classic version.

~~~
jpindar
Thank you!

------
emperorfin
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/..](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.

~~~
babuskov
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.

~~~
emperorfin
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](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.

~~~
babuskov
> I hope the classic interface you are talking about is same as the basic html
> view

No. There's are 3 interfaces: html, previous UI and new UI forced on users
now. New UI apparently contains some features from Inbox product, and is much
slower. You could opt out to use the old UI (dubbed Classic by Gmail) until
yesterday. Now I can only choose between new UI and html.

------
hluska
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...

~~~
tdb7893
People are always unhappy with new UIs (just look at what happens when Apple
tries to change anything) and hacker news seems to be pretty negative towards
all of the big tech companies (often deserved but sometimes not) so it's not
always the best barometer for these changes.

~~~
hluska
Those are excellent points.

------
sticazzi
Google has a lot of overpaid managers who need to do something to justify high
salaries. So I imagine they sit down and then stare at Gmail, a great product
that we all like, and then decide to make a lot of unnecessary changes that
will make us stop using it. About a year ago I registered a domain to use for
e-mail. Even though I currently use Google Suite because I like current
(classic) Gmail version, if they really persist and discontinue classic
version I will switch to another e-mail service.

~~~
calebh
Agreed. Why can't software devs just complete a project and then call it good?
Perpetual change is unnecessary and a waste of effort.

------
subpixel
It's worse than 'new Reddit', and I need to look at it 100x more often every
day.

~~~
expertentipp
[https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) \- once they shut it down my
reddit addiction will be cured.

~~~
gtyras2mrs
I fear the next step after shutting down the old reddit option would be to
severely cripple the API used by third-party apps to drive people to use their
apps.

When that happens, I will likely give up on reddit entirely.

------
zip1234
As others have said, performance is painful. I've also had problems where
emails would just not display after clicking on them. It would spin and say
'loading'. I like the look of it but speed is part of a design and needs to be
addressed.

------
player2121
It feels like google web-devs/disigners should start looking at the native
apps to get an idea of what the user expectations for the web-app are going to
be. If we look at microsoft web outlook, it is gradually becoming like its
native counterpart (which is the best desktop email client on my opinion).
They didn't have a good web expertise like google so it was too sluggish at
the begning but it's getting better. If webassemply becomes a thing, MS will
have a good chance to bring its dominance to the field of web apps.

What's interesting is that I remember how devs and designers were frustrated
when they were asked to build a web version of their desktop apps finding it
too hard to fit into new constrains. Now, I wont be surprised if web-
devs/designers feel frustrated too trying to build a desktop app with a mental
model of HTML documents and page reloads which is what the new gmail UX looks
like to me (the old one was not better, I just got used to it).

If it was up to me, I would focus only on performance and accessibility. I
would cut all animations and use much simpler (bare text if needed) ways to
present information. Today when you can be fast on web, no need to compensate
lack of it with too much content and animations.

------
adreamingsoul
I've reverted back to using the Basic HTML view. But, I'm also working to
migrate away from Gmail. Sad to see the demise of Google, but it seems all
good things must come to an end.

------
kgwxd
Ugg, everything was doing great with "flat design", I knew that wasn't going
to last, designers have to justify their position every few years after all. I
don't use Chrome often but I notices the bubbly round crap was making a come
back. I wouldn't care about the gmail change, because I don't use the web
interface often, but this company-wide redesign likely means everyone else
will be following suit. Mozilla, if you're listening, please don't, you were
always a cycle behind anyway, just stick with what you've got.

~~~
jackewiehose
> I knew that wasn't going to last, designers have to justify their position
> every few years after all

Yes, I think no UI-designer job should exist full time in one product. At some
time the design should be done. If not, you either screwed up or the design is
already great and from now on you will screw up.

Windows 8/10 is another example. From Windows 7 it just went downhill.

------
thecrumb
Amen. What really bugs me is it loads instantly in Chrome but in Firefox is
does it's loading animation and refreshes once or twice usually taking a few
seconds just to load the page.

~~~
kencausey
I just tested it in both Firefox and Chrome on an older Win7 system and my
subjective judgement of the loading time was that it was essentially identical
in each browser. Certainly the animation is shown in each.

~~~
babuskov
Is maybe the new Chrome login thing related to this. I'm starting to feel like
new GMail and the Chrome auto-login thing are somehow connected. Maybe the
whole GMail thing only tested with logged-in Chrome so they never noticed the
problem.

------
Twirrim
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 < 2 seconds.

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.

------
philwelch
Maybe ten years ago, Gmail was good enough that the webmail view was the best
email client, and for the first time in my life I stopped using IMAP.

Now, I don’t really care about Gmail’s UI because I use IMAP. Apple Mail
improved their UI just enough that Gmail’s regressions took it below the line.
But I don’t really care, because Gmail’s spam filtering is still much better
than Fastmail, which I know from having tried switching for a couple years.

------
xtracto
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.

~~~
what_ever
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.

------
codedokode
I remember earlier Google switched Doubleclick for Publishers to UI made with
Dart and material design. It is awful and looks like a product of some low
quality outsourcing company. It is slow to load (needs to load about 10 Mb to
start), it works very slowly, all animations are laggy.

I checked with Developer Tools, didnt't see anything resembling Dart in Gmail
(and it is not as slow as DFP). But there is 2.8 Mb JS file and 1.3 Mb CSS
file (loaded 3 times, don't know why). I am not sure if this is really
necessary to display a list of 20 newest emails. Also, a hangouts widget loads
additional 600 kb of JS and 600 Kb of CSS.

------
mehblahwhatevs
Can someone on the new UI tell me how to get the calendar widget in the
sidebar on the left? (below "Inbox", "Sent", "More", etc)

I'm using an item from "Labs":

> Google Calendar gadget > by Ben K and Garry B

But Labs is gone in the new UI and this gadget isn't available under any of
the new areas.

------
thsowers
I had to switch to using the basic HTML version, as the performance with the
new UI is terrible, no matter how much power the machine has

------
TeMPOraL
Soon after Google made their Pacman doodle, we've had an article tallying up
people-hours world-wide wasted by that little game. The article was in jest
(AFAIR), but I wonder, how many people-hours worldwide this UI update will be
wasting on a daily basis, by the virtue of being _even slower_ than the last
update.

------
dewey
As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind
that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to
back this up.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Where would they get that data? Users are given no way to voice negative
feedback.

If most users are like most non-techies I know, I assure you, they do care.
There's just nothing they can do, beyond telling first couple people they
encounter that they hate the new UI, and carrying on with their lives. Because
what are they going to do? Move 10 years of their e-mail history to Microsoft
and IM/phone 500 people about their new address?

\--

This is, by the way, my fully generic response to " _the market_ shows users
like web bloat". No, they don't. They just don't have a choice but to accept
it.

~~~
eiieirurjdndjd
> Where would they get that data?

The gmail product forums, monitoring sites like reddit, HN, and Twitter, focus
groups and UX studies, internal dogfooders and trusted external testers,
metrics from experimental or holdback groups, etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I sincerely hope they do that. Given the evidence though, I also doubt it, or
at least I feel the feedback is quickly dismissed under the "every UI change
breeds discontent" rule of thumb.

------
joshuawright11
Is it really that bad...? It looks about the same as the old with a material
coat of paint.

~~~
amflare
The hover effects are atrocious.

~~~
RickS
This is definitely the one that bugs me most. So distracting! All the hovered
rows jump out now, where before they just changed gray ever so slightly.

This is a place where the metaphors of material design subtract more value
than they add.

------
transpy
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.

~~~
bootlooped
Did they take away the ability to use the old UI? I still have a menu item
under settings that says "Go back to classic Gmail"

~~~
phnk
That menu item will vanish soon. Several users have reported it elsewhere in
this thread (it has vanished for me too).

~~~
bootlooped
It is now gone for me too.

------
coderintros
I almost never write comments here but I feel obliged to chime in: the new UI
is sooooo incredibly slow and I'm scratching my head to figure out why it's
gotten the green light.

------
kvdr
Also, the new (now a few months old) Google finance UI as well.

The charts are almost always broken, clicking on 1M will not show today's
levels.

And earlier I could just put a /FB or /GOOG in the URL to get to that page
instantly, now the URL is some 100s of long char string (sorry, I am from
C/C++ world so dont know the exact terms for these)

Then there is the news events map to the chart, used to be cool to see what
caused the dip/bump, but not there now..

I have since moved to Yahoo finance, but that has too much ads and autoplay
videos.

------
awill
My problem is that often I click to read email and nothing happens. I need to
refresh the whole page and click the email again. Happens in Chrome on both
Mac and Linux.

------
Boulth
I doubt anyone in power to change this would comment in here and do something
about it. Even if, the sunk costs fallacy guarantees they will stick with the
new UI.

------
undoware
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 casually imagine that they are dynamically
loading a lot of libs, so a broken pipe or a dropped packet or two would
certainly immobilize the UI until TCP/HTTP had gone through the dance of
either resending the packets in question, or teardown/setup.

That said, the previous edition of Gmail -- possibly because it was lighter
weight -- rarely misbehaved this way.

I believe we are seeing with gmail some of the current limits of the SPA
designs. So it's not Google's fault, per se, and we should expect more and
more sites to begin to evince the same drawbacks as the SPA model ineluctably
takes over. (It really is superior.)

Eventually, problems in SPA will be resolved by improvements at the backend,
on the wire, or by way of improvements to webpack, or the browsers themselves.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
throwaway5250
You probably shouldn't be using Gmail anyway, so consider it a feature. :-)

------
manigandham
It is very slow, especially on any lighter devices like small laptops. All the
JS seems to be rather heavy for no real new features or benefits.

------
colemickens
Painfully slow. If you load the interface, it becomes "mostly" functional, but
if you start trying to say, search your email:

1\. The page will reset and reload, or,

2\. Your keys will trigger a keyboard shortcut and then truly, good god damn
luck because who knows how many pages of emails you'll archive with no way to
undo (the toast that appears for 3 seconds is NOT sufficient, especially _if
you keep typing_.)

Hangouts, YouTube, and Gmail are embarrassing to use. And that's not even
discussing what happens in Firefox where everything is somehow nearly twice as
slow.

edit: Oh, let me say, it's bad enough that if I'm on a laptop where I don't
want to keep the bloated Gmail tab around in mem/cpu, I have reverted back to
using the Web 1.0 / mobile-esque version of Gmail. (Which has it's own
problems, attachments are broken, etc).

Just a mess. I am actively trying to move away from Google. Unfortunately, I
can't find anything that is half-as-good as Google Photos.

------
palimpsests
This comment and a few in this thread refer to the concept of "pain".

If it is causing you actual (physical / emotional / psychological / spiritual)
pain - why continue to inflict that on yourself? You are in charge of whether
or not you choose to use Google, nobody else.

However, I doubt that pain is the clearest or most precise way to express what
is happening here. My guess is that a better word would be "frustrated" or
"angry" \- emotional reactions that are potentially uncomfortable (so, OK, a
form of pain), depending on one's capacities and experience. Those reactions
are completely and totally valid.

I find it so funny how something so relatively trivial and ephemeral is turned
into such a personal affront. Nobody is trying to inflict pain on you with
their user interface desicions.

------
bitL
I like the new look actually (except for confusing icons), but it's just slow
and unreliable, can't recall needing to refresh so many times before because
loading got stuck. That all on a top end i9 with 100MBit/s Internet connection
in a city that has a large Google datacenter.

------
boksiora
yes i hate it, its horrible, its too distracting from the content, too
cluttered, please get back the old UI

------
amriksohata
Horrible SPA loading page, I don't know what the obsession is with SPA pages
they are just annoying

------
expertentipp
The compatibility of web UIs with the touch events accidentally resulted with
clean, stable, simple UIs. Apparently Google branched out the web and all
these mouse over effects give me epilepsy. Mouse over menu on table/list row?
I thought we went through this already.

------
Jaruzel
Do the IMAP or SMTP/POP3 options still work in GMail? If so, maybe it's time
for a proxy WebMail UI hosted on a tiny VPS that simply acts as the mail
client for you, whilst gmail still does all the heavy lifting of spam
filtering and trusted sending.

~~~
kgwxd
Standard protocols still work. Why not just use a proper email client instead
of a VPS hosted web UI?

~~~
Jaruzel
Well I'm guessing people like the concept of a Web UI, on the basis they are
using gmail in the first place.

I'm a self hosted MS Exchange + Outlook user, so I'm being purely devils
advocate here.

------
chaddattilio
Has anyone liked a UI redesign of anything anywhere?

~~~
richev
I actually really liked it when Office 2007 introduced the ribbon, in
particular when I understood the rationale behind it (which was covered at
MIX08[0]).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4)

------
mxpxrocks10
I'm enjoying it. All good from this end. I'm happy they keep reinvesting in
it.

------
shultays
Back button is broken until page is fully loaded. Once it is loaded, clicking
back returns back to inbox (while reading a mail). However if the page is not
fully loaded (loading circle is spinning) it goes back to previous browser
page.

------
Michie
Totally agree. I like the old gmail UI. It's more cleaner and easier to
navigate.

The new gmail UI is so cluttered. Full of unnecessary stuff. Hope they bring
back the option to revert back to classic UI. Mine is missing already.

------
mrcnkoba
I'm seriously considering switching away from gmail for two reasons:

1\. Privacy concerns

2\. The new and painfully slow Gmail UI

I think I finally realized that there are no free things in live and you
usually have to sacrifice something. Here it's privacy.

------
valbaca
Click the little "settings" gear and "Send Feedback"

~~~
OJFord
Yeah it's the fastest feature in GMail - reaches /dev/null in mere ns.

------
rahimnathwani
Why can't I easily use info from Gmail when adding contacts. For example, if
an email's 'from' line includes the name and email address of the sender, I'd
like to just tap (or right-click) it and have the option to 'add to contacts'.
But instead I have to copy each piece separately into a new tab (painful on
desktop, and even more annoying using the Android Contacts app).

And why can't I tap a phone number and save _that_ to contacts without several
extra steps?

------
TheAlchemist
This is really a disaster. I don't care that much for my personal email,
however at work, it's definitely impacting.

It's slow as most already noted. But I also find that it's much more mentally
exhaustive - it's maybe a bit more beautiful and fancy, but it's not what I
look for in work - I want things simple, well aligned and as readable as
possible. I've tried for several days the new interface and it was really a
big downgrade from the previous UI.

------
mrfredward
The auto-expanding sidebar drives me nuts. I don't want to use the entire
width of my widescreen monitor for reading an email, but I do want quick
access to my folders.

~~~
sp332
Hit the "hamburger" icon way up in the left corner next to the main Gmail
logo.

~~~
mrfredward
Thanks. My brain has been trained to think of this behavior as "pinning", now
I'll just have to get used to the hamburger.

~~~
sp332
Yeah the discoverability is terrible. Even knowing the feature existed, it
took me four or five tries to find it again just before I commented.

------
seba_dos1
It's so ugly and slow. I have switched to basic HTML view, it's way better
(although it still could be faster, refreshing takes quite a lot of server
time).

------
delbel
GMail one day decided to no longer show my emails from my customers in my
Inbox -- I have to search for them one-by-one. So every few hours I have to
search for keywords.

I also get gmail from another account, and he gets mine.

At least it is not as bad as Skype. Woke up one day a week ago, hit Upgrade,
and now Skype doesn't work -- whatsoever. Nothing I can do.

Essentially if I didn't have experience as a level 3 support engineer, I'd be
out of business.

~~~
seba_dos1
As much as I don't like the new GMail, this sounds like a bad filter rule and
a classic case of PEBCAK.

------
mingaldrichgan
Someone mentioned the calendar widget but what seems to be missing from the
new UI is the wonderful calendar integration where dates and times are turned
into links that I can click on to create a calendar event directly from an
email. That to me was the dealbreaker for switching to the new UI, and am
disappointed to hear that they are removing the option to revert back to the
classic UI.

------
simon_acca
Practical tip for those that want a web based solution right now: install
rainloop on a server and point it to gmail’s imap/smtp servers. Rainloop + an
http server that handles tls in front of it can be installed fairly painlessly
and quickly with docker.

[https://www.rainloop.net/](https://www.rainloop.net/)

------
jtl999
The fonts are atrocious and give me a headache to look at. I already have
damaged eyesight so that makes things worse as it is.

------
pictur
material design new cancer

~~~
galfarragem
I never understood the fuss about material design. While it's decent on
mobiles, it looks _terrible_ on desktops with low resolutions at least.

------
ddebernardy
I hate to be asking, but... what has changed exactly?

As one who has only ever used Gmail with a mail client, I'm not seeing any
obvious differences since the last time I had to log into the web interface to
set a few rules, except an unusually colorful Compose button - which might
have been there for a while for all I know.

------
selckin
My main issue is the keybinds, like before when you archived from the inbox it
would go to the next one, or you could use 'j', 'k' to go the next one and it
would open, now it does nothing after the next mail doesn't open when
archiving

this makes going through the inbox in the morning very frustrating

------
jpindar
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.)

~~~
aargh_aargh
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?

~~~
jpindar
Huh, I tried again and now they're working.

------
blueadept111
I was using Gmail in 'classic' mode until today, when they force-upgraded to
the new layout. In my opinion, even the "compact" mode is less compact. I
don't like it.

So as of today I'm forwarding all my email to protonmail. This was just the
push I needed to start switching over.

------
cshah4
The UI seems ok overall although definitely slower than before.

I have another weird issue happening though with my second Gmail account on
Chrome. Sometimes when I login, it refreshes during the flash screen of Gmail
logo and logs me out automatically going back to the login page. Has that
happened to anyone?

------
3K7m7bUZyWA1KCD
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.

------
jerrac
Do you have any comparison screenshots? I've been using Thunderbird for years
now, and haven't spent much time with the webui. I just looked at it, and it
doesn't seem much different from what I remember. Maybe the roll out hasn't
hit me yet?

~~~
dx87
I don't have screenshots, but the new UI looks like it was designed for touch
screens. The actual mail messages take up maybe 50% of the screen in the
middle, with different sized margins full of mostly huge, but some very tiny,
buttons to press on each side. Some of the buttons don't even have
descriptions, it's just an icon for another Google product. There's also a
smattering of giant buttons and icons scattered across the page, with no
consistency as to their size or alignment. It makes me think of someone
creating their first website, where it started out OK, but they feel the need
to keep adding features and filling in empty space so they just add more and
more buttons and icons all over the page that are only sort of related to the
main purpose of the page.

------
eleitl
I've started using Thunderbird with Gmail again. This is the first step to
moving the bulk of my email activity to my self-hosted mail server.

And, of course, I'm also ditching Chrome for Firefox (and Tor Browser) as
well.

Well done, Google. You finally forced my hand.

------
AimForTheBushes
It makes me feel like I'm a child at a daycare center. What's a good
alternative? I'm thinking of switching to iCloud as my primary but I don't
know if I want to be completely ingrained into Apple's ecosystem.

~~~
x2f10
iCloud has its own benefits but the web UI is not one. iCloud is slower than
Google's services and _does not work_ on a mobile browser.

I had left my phone at home while visiting a friend. I was shocked to learn I
could not view iCloud.com (and my e-mails) from my girlfriend's phone without
signing in to the iPhone itself via settings.

Look into Fastmail.com or Outlook Premium.

------
Michielvv
I don't really mind the new design itself, but the new font looks too blurry
to look at on my non-retina mac. ( I suspect the ﻿-moz-osx-font-
smoothing:grayscale) and it is insanely slow.

Luckily I can still revert back on GSuite for now.

------
IdontRememberIt
Same with youtube (when logged in). If it were not in Alphabet's portfolio, it
would be buried on the last page of Google index due to horrible performance.

------
janitor61
I'm just happy that we finally get a "replied" icon to denote which emails
I've replied to, been waiting for that feature for years now

------
psychometry
I just wish they would spend some time on the alternate themes that all look
terrible and haven't been updated since they launched that feature.

~~~
chippy
All the themes, except "high contrast" just change the background image.

------
yesenadam
I use the old html version, amazingly it's not even possible to bulk delete
emails! Which is the one thing you'd want to do with email.

------
provolone
Analytics, webmaster tools, gmail, google news - all of these sites are
bloated. Meanwhile Google wants developers to use AMP because...

------
copperx
Tangential, but does anybody here have a email app recommendation for Linux?
Something that can replace browsing Gmail on a browser?

~~~
commoner
Thunderbird is the most popular choice and supports add-ons.

For comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Outlook, Evolution is well-
integrated into GNOME, while KMail (part of Kontact) is well-integrated into
KDE.

Alternatively, Geary (GTK+ 3 based, adopted by GNOME), Pantheon Mail
(Elementary's fork of Geary), Claws Mail (lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Sylpheed
(lightweight GTK+ 2 based), Trojitá (lightweight Qt 5 based), Kube (Qt 5
based, integrates with Kolab Now), and Mutt (text-based) also work on Linux.

All of these applications are free and open-source, and some of them also work
on Windows and macOS.

Thunderbird: [https://www.thunderbird.net/en-
US/](https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/)

Evolution:
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/)

KMail:
[https://www.kde.org/applications/internet/kmail/](https://www.kde.org/applications/internet/kmail/)

Geary: [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary)

Pantheon Mail:
[https://github.com/elementary/mail](https://github.com/elementary/mail)

Claws Mail: [https://www.claws-mail.org/](https://www.claws-mail.org/)

Sylpheed: [http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)

Trojitá: [http://trojita.flaska.net/](http://trojita.flaska.net/)

Kube: [https://kube-project.com/](https://kube-project.com/)

Mutt: [http://www.mutt.org/](http://www.mutt.org/)

------
MilnerRoute
It still infuriates me when they make me watch that little cartoon Gmail logo
while I'm waiting for my inbox to appear...

------
drivingmenuts
It was too busy for me so I switched back to the older version. I just read
need to read email. Keep it simple-er.

------
tinktank
Google people -- It doesn't work!! I will click a label only to get an empty
window with no emails

------
ydnaclementine
old, classic view lives under the gear

------
Crontab
This reminds me of Flickr and Reddit; where they also got the UI right early
on and then ruined it.

------
rajacombinator
Gotta keep those designers busy somehow! (Even if it’s making poor redesigns
no one wanted...)

------
stunt
Most of the Google products are annoyingly slow for me. (I'm using Firefox)

------
d0m
Yeah.. new the UI feels like a new css had a bad merge with the previous one.

------
fiatjaf
I've switched to basic HTML view. Looking for a new email client.

------
SilasX
You can't honestly expect Gmail to support an old UI. New features are added
to email all the time and it's far too complicated to develop too feature sets
on two extremely dynamic code bases.

------
kermittd
It is terrible! Seems to be no way to change it back.

------
howrdrork
It’s still way better than outlook or protonmail imo

------
aj7
Trick question: Where ARE your contacts, anyway?

------
whorleater
Basic HTML view for Gmail is still very usable

------
Number8
I don't use Gmail, I use GMX.com for my mail. But I also use Firefox klar as
my browser and duckduckgo.com for my search engine. But what do I know.

------
savethefuture
Bye bye google

------
lbebber
I like it.

------
Jugurtha
If I may ask, is there a reason you are using Gmail in your browser instead of
a mail client?

------
settings11
I use old HTML UI btw.

------
ieo838jdkd
Other than the big, rainbow compose button looking tacky, and the perform nose
dive, the experience isn’t too different to me

------
swingline-747
Yet another opportunity for yet another Sparrow or Inbox app. Thanks,
Alphabet!

------
dylanhassinger
i agree

------
dragon96
I don't understand how this qualifies as a "painful" or "horrific" update.

It seems that most of the hate is either about (a) a slower loading screen or
(b) worse design. The latter is debatable, but the former is just a ridiculous
complaint. At worst, the load seems to be around 0.5 seconds slower on a
mediocre internet connection, so if you can't spare an extra 5 seconds a day
from refreshing Gmail 10 times a day, you should consider checking your email
a little bit less often.

