Everything has gotten bulkier in Gmail, not just the JS, but th CSS, the DOM, the fonts, assets overall because Gmail is an app that’s over a decade old and fea

Everything has gotten bulkier in Gmail, not just the JS, but th CSS, the DOM, the fonts, assets overall because Gmail is an app that’s over a decade old and features have mostly been added, not removed. This is the fate of all legacy software, OSes, native apps, they all eventually burst under their own weight, and are rewritten clean. Inbox was that dream :) In particular, Gmail has been engineered to mostly be served as a single page app that functions offline as well. SPAs were a bad architectural trend now being somewhat reversed by code-split PWAs. The same JS tools like Closure Compiler that enable large SPAs also enable efficient code splitting into tiny pieces (look at photos.google.com as an example) A hammer is only as good as what you use to build. Web apps got native app envy after installables and app stores took off. I think we’ve woke up from that now and you’ll gradually see it improve.