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I think it takes a technical lead who has the vision & skill to balance house-keeping work with new feature development. It can be both technical as well as pol

I think it takes a technical lead who has the vision & skill to balance house-keeping work with new feature development. It can be both technical as well as political skill. One methodology that I employ is "visibility-based development" where we will save up some super easy tasks that may have a big visual impact. When we need a sprint or two to get some boring clean-up work done, we'll throw in a few of those easy tasks with it. We've had some releases that look like a big, major release but in reality we only spent 1/2 a day on the features that seem big. The rest of the time was under the hood cleanup. In some cases it's not simply your customers that require the illusion, but the management team as well. If you have a management team that gets uneasy if they don't see new features happening with every release, I highly recommend using this technique.

AznHisoka 11y ago
I find in most cases it's not your customers that require this at all. The majority of Gmail probably don't want it to change.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Pretty much, the basic HTML version of Gmail they strongly advise you against using is closer to the Gmail I want than the Gmail that they push by default. Heck, that goes for most of Google. Look at this beauty: https://www.google.com/?noj=1&gws_rd=ssl https://www.google.com/?noj=1&gws_rd=ssl Why is this not still the default google.com?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Hm, an 'alias' plug in for urls?
  - Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
    And the Gmail bloat is nothing compared to the Yahoo! Mail bloat. It's so slow and bloated that with my phone I'm not even able to get as far as downloading an attachment, and I'm talking about an 1.5-year-old high-end phone where I can do pretty much anything otherwise. In a high-end PC, it also takes a long while to download attachments, and when the connection is flaky, even reading email is difficult. There is a "basic" version (which they also advise against) which is significantly better, but still slow and bloated. Yahoo used to be my go-to account back from around 1997, but after the successive iterations of bloat, it's now in a point where I only use it for unimportant website registrations (i.e. spam fodder).
  - sfk 11y ago
    The current design is closer to the original design. Wait a couple of years, and the design you like will be back. Everything goes in circles for the reasons other people have mentioned above.
  - Joeri 11y ago
    Upon following that link a giant banner was displayed saying "it's better in the app". It seems they've discovered there's still a lightweight version of google left and are quickly trying to close the gate. By the way, why on earth would anyone want an app to do a google search? When searching for a webpage, the best 'app' is going to be the one that shows webpages, named 'the browser'. It's like going to weightwatchers.com and seeing a banner ad that tells you "it's better with mcdonalds". It is laughably grotesque. What happened to google that they've strayed so far from sanity?
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      > By the way, why on earth would anyone want an app to do a google search? Because it provides a neat search widget, plus Google Now.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    How does that link look for you, compared to google.com? On my phone, both the mobile and desktop version pages are identical and pretty minimalist.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      The biggest difference on desktop is you get the old black bar offering links to the 10 or so Google products that actually matter, rather than the dropdown. It also seems to load faster.
  - jasonkostempski 11y ago
    I looked at that on my phone and got redirected to the mobile version. JS enable, 4 toolbar buttons, animated image, search bar, a prompt to use my location and a prompt to "install the app."
  - niutech 11y ago
    This is more lightweight: http://www.google.com/custom http://www.google.com/custom
soheil 11y ago
It seems like technical debt. Lots of what causes bloated pages can be fixed with simple solutions like scaling down gigantic images. I agree there are still major design decisions that can have a big impact, but there are also lots of things that can be done in most cases without too much elbow grease. For example simply installing Pagespeed will optimize a page that previously would take many architectural and dev hours to fix. So maybe the debate should be are the automated tools like Pagespeed moving at the same rate as our appetite to create more bloated pages.
- other_herbert 11y ago
  Also going back and cleaning up resources (css and js references). Lots of dead css is out there in the wild

AznHisoka 11y ago

I find in most cases it's not your customers that require this at all. The majority of Gmail probably don't want it to change.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Pretty much, the basic HTML version of Gmail they strongly advise you against using is closer to the Gmail I want than the Gmail that they push by default. Heck, that goes for most of Google. Look at this beauty: https://www.google.com/?noj=1&gws_rd=ssl https://www.google.com/?noj=1&gws_rd=ssl Why is this not still the default google.com?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Hm, an 'alias' plug in for urls?
- Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
  And the Gmail bloat is nothing compared to the Yahoo! Mail bloat. It's so slow and bloated that with my phone I'm not even able to get as far as downloading an attachment, and I'm talking about an 1.5-year-old high-end phone where I can do pretty much anything otherwise. In a high-end PC, it also takes a long while to download attachments, and when the connection is flaky, even reading email is difficult. There is a "basic" version (which they also advise against) which is significantly better, but still slow and bloated. Yahoo used to be my go-to account back from around 1997, but after the successive iterations of bloat, it's now in a point where I only use it for unimportant website registrations (i.e. spam fodder).
- sfk 11y ago
  The current design is closer to the original design. Wait a couple of years, and the design you like will be back. Everything goes in circles for the reasons other people have mentioned above.
- Joeri 11y ago
  Upon following that link a giant banner was displayed saying "it's better in the app". It seems they've discovered there's still a lightweight version of google left and are quickly trying to close the gate. By the way, why on earth would anyone want an app to do a google search? When searching for a webpage, the best 'app' is going to be the one that shows webpages, named 'the browser'. It's like going to weightwatchers.com and seeing a banner ad that tells you "it's better with mcdonalds". It is laughably grotesque. What happened to google that they've strayed so far from sanity?
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    > By the way, why on earth would anyone want an app to do a google search? Because it provides a neat search widget, plus Google Now.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  How does that link look for you, compared to google.com? On my phone, both the mobile and desktop version pages are identical and pretty minimalist.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The biggest difference on desktop is you get the old black bar offering links to the 10 or so Google products that actually matter, rather than the dropdown. It also seems to load faster.
- jasonkostempski 11y ago
  I looked at that on my phone and got redirected to the mobile version. JS enable, 4 toolbar buttons, animated image, search bar, a prompt to use my location and a prompt to "install the app."
- niutech 11y ago
  This is more lightweight: http://www.google.com/custom http://www.google.com/custom

soheil 11y ago

It seems like technical debt. Lots of what causes bloated pages can be fixed with simple solutions like scaling down gigantic images. I agree there are still major design decisions that can have a big impact, but there are also lots of things that can be done in most cases without too much elbow grease. For example simply installing Pagespeed will optimize a page that previously would take many architectural and dev hours to fix. So maybe the debate should be are the automated tools like Pagespeed moving at the same rate as our appetite to create more bloated pages.

other_herbert 11y ago
Also going back and cleaning up resources (css and js references). Lots of dead css is out there in the wild