5 ms·

Gmail is now crazy slow for me. Used to be nice and snappy, I dread even clicking a button in there now. I even pay for it with GSuite. > I sigh — actually sig

Gmail is now crazy slow for me. Used to be nice and snappy, I dread even clicking a button in there now. I even pay for it with GSuite. > I sigh — actually sigh — whenever I have to open Photoshop Yep, quad-core laptop with fast SSD and I dread opening it. I remember being an early adopter with an SSD and I just used to open PS to see how fast it opened. They took that feeling away.

edgarvaldes 7y ago
I used to click the button for the html version in the right bottom corner... but now the button doesn't respond because the app is not fully loaded yet, wich is funny. I now have a bookmark for the non JS version.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  Too much javascript. And they are probably optimizing for First meaningful paint (FMP) over Time to interactive (TTI). Strange for a company that is putting this out: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/user-centric-performance-metrics https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/u...
  - emerongi 7y ago
    I'm not running anything abnormal, have a 2018 Thinkpad with a decent connection (20Mbps). GMail loads like I'm on Win95, which is the first OS I've ever used. It's 2019, the app is built by one of the leading tech companies, I have a modern device with good connection (not the absolute best I could get, but still OK). Why does it take like 5 seconds to load GMail? I would expect it to be ~1s, considering it's built by freaking Google. I'd expect some mega-optimizations going into this thing and to be amazed that they managed to squeeze everything out of a simple mail app. I'd like to imagine myself thinking I'd never be able to build THAT thing, yet it's not the case. And it's not just the loading part - interactions even after first load feel sluggish. If you try the HTML version, it feels more responsive even just navigating the inbox. It could be psychological, but even in that case it would suggest that they need to improve the first load to make me feel like the app is fast in general.
    - asark 7y ago
      I'm on Google Fiber, of all things, and it's slow as hell. I use basic HTML instead, much faster. As you note, even interactions are faster which, you know, was the whole point of AJAX back in the day but I guess by the time you mediate that through a bunch of bloated serialization formats and bullshit abstraction atop the DOM it's not fast anymore. Basic HTML's very snappy. I (at least internally) swear any time I open Google Maps, either by accident or when I can't avoid using it. Same for Google office suite webapps, which I avoid as much as possible.
    - type0 7y ago
      I had to observe this during the meeting, someone was giving a presentation: oh yeah just remember to mention this thing, let me open my mail quick, ... Gmail loading... and the whole room fills with malaise.
    - aquaticsunset 7y ago
      Why aren’t they making it mega lightning fast? Not because they can’t, but because the market is willing to put up with the sluggishness. I treat it just like how I treat the massive phone screen sizes and lack of stick shift cars in the US auto market. Consumers just don’t care about the same things I do.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  But again... beside the first loading every now and then, it is pretty fast for me. After I disabled some extensions the Lighthouse metrics improved but not dramatically. Are you using a privacy extension that keep clearing the browser cache? Did you try in a private window? Is it still annoying on the second load?
  - edgarvaldes 7y ago
    >beside the first loading every now and then I don't keep the tabs opened. I close gmail when done reading or responding email (I check my inbox every 2-3 hours.) I even close the browser very frequently during the day.
    - vntok 7y ago
      You're not the user story that they optimize for. Try leaving the Gmail tab open for a while, you'll quickly get to reap the speed benefits too.
- chii 7y ago
  https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ The mobile web version. Works really well, even on a desktop!
derg 7y ago
If you don't need any of the fancy stuff, the basic HTML view is snappy and loads incredibly fast for me.
asark 7y ago
Use the "basic HTML" version and make it your default view. On mobile it's even worth putting up with its more desktopy appearance to avoid the bloated crap that is modern Gmail. The site takes so f*$%ing long to load you should have no problem clicking the "Slow? Try the Basic HTML version" link, maybe with 2-3 tries to figure out where it is (it's a small link). Then you should see an option to set it as your default. Bonus: you can actually leave it open in a tab without eating three figure MB of memory and sometimes slowing down your machine doing god-knows-what in the background. Only downside is no notifications for new mail, but 1) that assumes you consider that a downside, and 2) that's what actual, native email clients are for.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  Wrt your downside, I haven't tried this myself but I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to write an extension to check for new emails every x minutes - if there's a button to refresh your mailbox you can just put an a call to the button's click event[0] inside a setTimeout, and if there's no button just refresh the page (you will probably need logic to make sure you aren't actively interacting with it). But most likely a quick 30 minute project if you've made an extension before (and only an hour or so if not). [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/click https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
- Nition 7y ago
  Here's a direct link to go to the basic HTML version: http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
  - chii 7y ago
    And the mobile-web version is even better imho : https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  Gmail takes a good five seconds to load the basic UI on my i7 laptop (and then some more time to load messages), but for some reason the Basic HTML link in the corner doesn't work. I've logged in a few times this week and clicked the link each time, and the browser confirms the click with the focus rectangle appearing, but it still loads the slow version of Gmail. This is in Firefox as well as Falkon (WebKit-based). My company uses Outlook/Exchange and it also has a webapp; the website is pretty feature-rich and has a UI very similar to native Outlook, but it is blazing fast. The folks at Google are doing something very wrong to make it this slow.
lph 7y ago
It's not just you. Gmail has become so slow to load for me that I wonder if they've deliberately sabotaged it on Firefox. Amazing how it's 2019 and web apps somehow seem to be less usable than they were ten years ago. I miss fast desktop apps.
- FridgeSeal 7y ago
  If a chunk of the time, effort and money that went into making web UI so nice and easy to work in could be invested into making true desktop apps equally as nice (no, electron doesn’t count) then I think we’d be in a great place.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Don't despair, it's slow as hell on Chrome too.
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
It looks Google Audit agree with you: https://imgur.com/a/mROAbvh https://imgur.com/a/mROAbvh Chrome 75.0.3770.142 with not extension active.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  But this is getting so ridiculous I find it hard to believe. Aren't people at Google supposed to be one of the smartest in the world? Don't they see what they did to their flagship product? Are they completely blind?
  - phtrivier 7y ago
    Is GMail their flagship product ? I would say "Search" is their flagship product (and I don't know if it's getting slower.) I've never used to commercial tools that their actual customers (advertisers) use, I wonder if they are more polished in terms of speed.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rzzzt 7y ago
Photoshop 3.0 was the sweet spot for me. A reasonable set of functionality coupled with good speed.
- thrax 7y ago
  Check out photopea.com it's a free web based Photoshop clone.
OJFord 7y ago
I thought 'Fastmail' was a silly name until I logged back into Gmail. And then waited for it to load.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  I just checked and Fastmail loaded for around 3 seconds, while Gmail loaded for less than 2 seconds.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    I work on Fastmail’s webmail. Did you have a warm cache for either? I find that Fastmail’s cold load is generally a fair bit faster than Gmail’s cold load, and Fastmail’s warm load is consistently faster than Gmail’s warm load; but Fastmail’s cold load can be slower than Gmail’s warm load. I’m looking forward to working on service worker code loading loading and offline support in Fastmail; I expect us to get warm loading to under one second on a typical desktop machine, regardless of location (because it will require no network calls). Either way, once the code has loaded, Fastmail is consistently snappier than Gmail. And uses far less memory (in Firefox, 10–15MB instead of >150MB). Offline mode will improve snappiness even further even if you don’t opt into actual offline sync, by virtue of persisting its data record cache. But that’s not implemented yet.
    - dceddia 7y ago
      Thanks for your work on Fastmail. In my experience it definitely lives up to its name. I love how instantaneous everything feels.
    - FluffyKitty 7y ago
      I used the Fastmail site today after a long time to change some setting and noticed the UI had been updated. Really liking the new look, great job to you and your team! I was interested in what front-end library you guys were using so I did a bit of searching and found a twitter post about OvertureJS. I know this is kind of random, but I'd love to understand how you guys came to the decision to build a framework from scratch instead of relying on Angular/React. What kind of technical limitations did they have that you guys wished to tackle with Overture?
closeparen 7y ago
Professional tools can get away with slow cold starts, since they’re likely to be left open all day. If the individual editing operations were slow, that would be another thing.
- winrid 7y ago
  There is easily almost a second of lag when navigating the UI (selecting and deleting emails) using the keyboard on a MBP. :(
bzbarsky 7y ago
What I found really eye-opening was looking at the about:memory output for gmail in Firefox. There's more memory used for the various chat-related iframes than for the actual gmail bits themselves. And I suspect the chat widget is not the thing people really want out of gmail.

edgarvaldes 7y ago

I used to click the button for the html version in the right bottom corner... but now the button doesn't respond because the app is not fully loaded yet, wich is funny. I now have a bookmark for the non JS version.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago
Too much javascript. And they are probably optimizing for First meaningful paint (FMP) over Time to interactive (TTI). Strange for a company that is putting this out: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/user-centric-performance-metrics https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/u...
- emerongi 7y ago
  I'm not running anything abnormal, have a 2018 Thinkpad with a decent connection (20Mbps). GMail loads like I'm on Win95, which is the first OS I've ever used. It's 2019, the app is built by one of the leading tech companies, I have a modern device with good connection (not the absolute best I could get, but still OK). Why does it take like 5 seconds to load GMail? I would expect it to be ~1s, considering it's built by freaking Google. I'd expect some mega-optimizations going into this thing and to be amazed that they managed to squeeze everything out of a simple mail app. I'd like to imagine myself thinking I'd never be able to build THAT thing, yet it's not the case. And it's not just the loading part - interactions even after first load feel sluggish. If you try the HTML version, it feels more responsive even just navigating the inbox. It could be psychological, but even in that case it would suggest that they need to improve the first load to make me feel like the app is fast in general.
  - asark 7y ago
    I'm on Google Fiber, of all things, and it's slow as hell. I use basic HTML instead, much faster. As you note, even interactions are faster which, you know, was the whole point of AJAX back in the day but I guess by the time you mediate that through a bunch of bloated serialization formats and bullshit abstraction atop the DOM it's not fast anymore. Basic HTML's very snappy. I (at least internally) swear any time I open Google Maps, either by accident or when I can't avoid using it. Same for Google office suite webapps, which I avoid as much as possible.
  - type0 7y ago
    I had to observe this during the meeting, someone was giving a presentation: oh yeah just remember to mention this thing, let me open my mail quick, ... Gmail loading... and the whole room fills with malaise.
  - aquaticsunset 7y ago
    Why aren’t they making it mega lightning fast? Not because they can’t, but because the market is willing to put up with the sluggishness. I treat it just like how I treat the massive phone screen sizes and lack of stick shift cars in the US auto market. Consumers just don’t care about the same things I do.
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
But again... beside the first loading every now and then, it is pretty fast for me. After I disabled some extensions the Lighthouse metrics improved but not dramatically. Are you using a privacy extension that keep clearing the browser cache? Did you try in a private window? Is it still annoying on the second load?
- edgarvaldes 7y ago
  >beside the first loading every now and then I don't keep the tabs opened. I close gmail when done reading or responding email (I check my inbox every 2-3 hours.) I even close the browser very frequently during the day.
  - vntok 7y ago
    You're not the user story that they optimize for. Try leaving the Gmail tab open for a while, you'll quickly get to reap the speed benefits too.
chii 7y ago
https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ The mobile web version. Works really well, even on a desktop!

derg 7y ago

If you don't need any of the fancy stuff, the basic HTML view is snappy and loads incredibly fast for me.

asark 7y ago

Use the "basic HTML" version and make it your default view. On mobile it's even worth putting up with its more desktopy appearance to avoid the bloated crap that is modern Gmail. The site takes so f*$%ing long to load you should have no problem clicking the "Slow? Try the Basic HTML version" link, maybe with 2-3 tries to figure out where it is (it's a small link). Then you should see an option to set it as your default. Bonus: you can actually leave it open in a tab without eating three figure MB of memory and sometimes slowing down your machine doing god-knows-what in the background. Only downside is no notifications for new mail, but 1) that assumes you consider that a downside, and 2) that's what actual, native email clients are for.

chipperyman573 7y ago
Wrt your downside, I haven't tried this myself but I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to write an extension to check for new emails every x minutes - if there's a button to refresh your mailbox you can just put an a call to the button's click event[0] inside a setTimeout, and if there's no button just refresh the page (you will probably need logic to make sure you aren't actively interacting with it). But most likely a quick 30 minute project if you've made an extension before (and only an hour or so if not). [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/click https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
Nition 7y ago
Here's a direct link to go to the basic HTML version: http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
- chii 7y ago
  And the mobile-web version is even better imho : https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/ https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/
the_pwner224 7y ago
Gmail takes a good five seconds to load the basic UI on my i7 laptop (and then some more time to load messages), but for some reason the Basic HTML link in the corner doesn't work. I've logged in a few times this week and clicked the link each time, and the browser confirms the click with the focus rectangle appearing, but it still loads the slow version of Gmail. This is in Firefox as well as Falkon (WebKit-based). My company uses Outlook/Exchange and it also has a webapp; the website is pretty feature-rich and has a UI very similar to native Outlook, but it is blazing fast. The folks at Google are doing something very wrong to make it this slow.

lph 7y ago

It's not just you. Gmail has become so slow to load for me that I wonder if they've deliberately sabotaged it on Firefox. Amazing how it's 2019 and web apps somehow seem to be less usable than they were ten years ago. I miss fast desktop apps.

FridgeSeal 7y ago
If a chunk of the time, effort and money that went into making web UI so nice and easy to work in could be invested into making true desktop apps equally as nice (no, electron doesn’t count) then I think we’d be in a great place.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Don't despair, it's slow as hell on Chrome too.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

It looks Google Audit agree with you: https://imgur.com/a/mROAbvh https://imgur.com/a/mROAbvh Chrome 75.0.3770.142 with not extension active.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
But this is getting so ridiculous I find it hard to believe. Aren't people at Google supposed to be one of the smartest in the world? Don't they see what they did to their flagship product? Are they completely blind?
- phtrivier 7y ago
  Is GMail their flagship product ? I would say "Search" is their flagship product (and I don't know if it's getting slower.) I've never used to commercial tools that their actual customers (advertisers) use, I wonder if they are more polished in terms of speed.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rzzzt 7y ago

Photoshop 3.0 was the sweet spot for me. A reasonable set of functionality coupled with good speed.

thrax 7y ago
Check out photopea.com it's a free web based Photoshop clone.

OJFord 7y ago

I thought 'Fastmail' was a silly name until I logged back into Gmail. And then waited for it to load.

vbezhenar 7y ago
I just checked and Fastmail loaded for around 3 seconds, while Gmail loaded for less than 2 seconds.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  I work on Fastmail’s webmail. Did you have a warm cache for either? I find that Fastmail’s cold load is generally a fair bit faster than Gmail’s cold load, and Fastmail’s warm load is consistently faster than Gmail’s warm load; but Fastmail’s cold load can be slower than Gmail’s warm load. I’m looking forward to working on service worker code loading loading and offline support in Fastmail; I expect us to get warm loading to under one second on a typical desktop machine, regardless of location (because it will require no network calls). Either way, once the code has loaded, Fastmail is consistently snappier than Gmail. And uses far less memory (in Firefox, 10–15MB instead of >150MB). Offline mode will improve snappiness even further even if you don’t opt into actual offline sync, by virtue of persisting its data record cache. But that’s not implemented yet.
  - dceddia 7y ago
    Thanks for your work on Fastmail. In my experience it definitely lives up to its name. I love how instantaneous everything feels.
  - FluffyKitty 7y ago
    I used the Fastmail site today after a long time to change some setting and noticed the UI had been updated. Really liking the new look, great job to you and your team! I was interested in what front-end library you guys were using so I did a bit of searching and found a twitter post about OvertureJS. I know this is kind of random, but I'd love to understand how you guys came to the decision to build a framework from scratch instead of relying on Angular/React. What kind of technical limitations did they have that you guys wished to tackle with Overture?

closeparen 7y ago

Professional tools can get away with slow cold starts, since they’re likely to be left open all day. If the individual editing operations were slow, that would be another thing.

winrid 7y ago
There is easily almost a second of lag when navigating the UI (selecting and deleting emails) using the keyboard on a MBP. :(

bzbarsky 7y ago

What I found really eye-opening was looking at the about:memory output for gmail in Firefox. There's more memory used for the various chat-related iframes than for the actual gmail bits themselves. And I suspect the chat widget is not the thing people really want out of gmail.