I agree that server side rendering of gmail would greatly speed up the load and remove the need for a progress bar. The word on the street is Gmail has too much

I agree that server side rendering of gmail would greatly speed up the load and remove the need for a progress bar. The word on the street is Gmail has too much legacy code in it to much modernizing with. It's also one of the few very special apps that users tend to keep open forever in a tab, and never do page navigation. Definitely don't use GMail as your benchmark unless you're making something as specialized and popular as what they have now.