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>The "oops" have begun... Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I

>The "oops" have begun... Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

einr 7y ago
Another thing: every single time I use Google to search for a Firefox extension such as uBlock Origin or anything else that is available on both browsers, the equivalent Chrome extension is consistently the first result. It knows my user agent. It knows very well that the Firefox extension is the relevant result. This is 100% done out of malice.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I really, really, suspect that the Google search isn't even close to that smart, that active malice comes in. Pure statistics would put the Chrome version of something higher than the Firefox version due to sheer weight of user-base. Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.
  - einr 7y ago
    Nor are user-agents in any way reliable. Reliable enough to constantly break, penalize and nag me for using Firefox in other ways, apparently. This happens and is well-documented, not a conspiracy theory.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - simias 7y ago
    I agree with you. Given the current browser market share it would make sense for Chrome extensions to be more popular than Firefox's without any special-case meddling.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      It does surprise me how unpopular this sentiment is. Maybe people don't like the idea that most of the algorithms that they interact with a pretty stupid and just weight things by frequency? It does seem like people attribute considerably more intelligence to algorithms than there actually are there. It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.
      - simias 7y ago
        I don't really get it either, I don't think it's super controversial. I think there's an angry mob going after Google and anything not going in that sense is aggressively downvoted. I think that the anger is justified but it doesn't justify making up poorly substantiated conspiracy theories. The hard facts are enough to see what Google is doing anyway, no need to write fanfiction.
        einr 7y ago
        Speaking of hard facts, I'm sure that before you decided to call my claim a "poorly substantiated conspiracy theory" you have verified that Google does not alter search results based on user-agent, i.e. by doing the same searches in blank installs of Firefox and Chrome on the same computer, right?
ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
I'm on the latest version of Firefox and G Suite mail is quite performant indeed. I don't see where you're getting this.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I don't use Gmail anymore as a primary address, but when I do check my old address, Gmail takes up to 30 seconds to load on Firefox. Emails often take several seconds to delete, and if I close the tab a few seconds after deleting the emails, they don't actually get deleted, even if they appear to. I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.
  - snazz 7y ago
    That’s something broken with your Firefox install or computer then. It’s very performant on any of my two G Suite and one Gmail accounts on Firefox as well as Chrome.
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      Or something broken in how Gmail handles a wide variety of Firefox installs/configurations (this is a common reported issue). The fact that you personally haven't seen it ("works on my machine!") doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist.
  - hnews_account_1 7y ago
    Interesting. Are you exaggerating a bit here or being accurate with those timelines? Cos Gmail is really slow on Firefox for me too, but it doesn't take half a minute to load. More like 10-15 seconds, which in this day and age is a nonsensical amount of time. Similarly operations have a 2-3 second lag. Noticeable to normal users but people like my parents wouldn't be able to see it.
dahart 7y ago
I love Firefox, but it has had an especially bad habit for years of perf tanking across version upgrades. You should try a full uninstall/reinstall along with a full delete of preferences and cache before assuming that Google has anything to do with Gmail perf on Firefox.
adonese 7y ago
I have been using gmail for quite long time. It is getting ridiculously terrible these days (in the past couple of years I guess!) My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client. It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.
- NegativeLatency 7y ago
  IMAP still works, you could use a local client
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  I haven't used webmail ui in years, and couldn't be happier. All native application deliver far superior experience, are more performance work offline etc.
  - copperx 7y ago
    If only IMAP worked decently in Gmail.
- wkey 7y ago
  I will have one browser window open, but in my task manager will have like 17 concurrent chrome processes running, slowing things down so much. I understand there are certain things running in the background but it is extremely hard to close out of certain tasks and stop plugins without terminating my entire browsing session.
- hnick 7y ago
  > It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years. You might enjoy this talk if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
deadbunny 7y ago
Another voice of an unaffected FF user here. Emalis open in sub 1 sec in FF for me, both free Gmail and paid GApps accounts. EVen went back a we pages of emails and clicked at random, all <1 sec easily.
andrewmutz 7y ago
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice" -Hacker News
- ineedasername 7y ago
  How about: "Sufficient levels of stupidity are indistinguishable from malice"
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    Indifference is not stupidity. "My feature is done. I don't care if or how it hurts the user."
    - justinclift 7y ago
      Possible a bad example, as that one sounds incredibly stupid. ;)
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      I think indifference is a perfectly good substitute here as well: "Sufficient levels of indifference are indistinguishable from malice". Yep, that works too.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  "Google is a small indie company. Don't be so hard on them." -- Some guy on HN
- simias 7y ago
  This is a systematic issue with many of Google's services. They have the money and manpower to test their interface on Firefox. We're talking about a modern, generally standard-compliant browser here, not IE6. Getting those websites to perform decently on Firefox shouldn't be a problem for Google. I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).
ineedasername 7y ago
I wonder what would happen if you used Chrome, but changed your user-agent to Firefox? Would the issues reappear?
euix 7y ago
late last year gmail started complaining I had used up all its storage space of 15 GB and asked me to start paying for more storage. That was the last straw, if I am going to pay for email I might as well spend my money and not give away my data for ads and privacy. I signed up for fastmail. Now outside from Android and maps and keep, I am pretty much off google.
sp332 7y ago
This is one of those mysterious things that hits certain people's accounts and not others. Here's a thread with suggestions from 2012. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477361
kingofpandora 7y ago
I use FF exclusively and GMail works just fine - no delays. Not sure what the captcha on Firefox 'feature' refers to but nothing springs to mind as not working in that department either.
swiley 7y ago
Open gmail once with noscript and it will give you the option to switch to the classic interface that actually works. I had to help someone with something the other day and saw the current version of gmail in safari and I feel sorry for anyone that has to use that.
mda 7y ago
Maybe it is about your setup? I actually got curious and tested Firefox with my personal gmail account (using it for >10 years, so it has tons of emails, filters etc). I did not notice any big issues, text rendering seems slightly different, maybe chrome version is slightly snappier but that's it.
bad_user 7y ago
Personally I don't run Gmail in the browser — people complain about running Gmail on top of Firefox, but it has performance issues on top of Chrome too. You get a much better experience with a native app, like MailMate or Thunderbird. I just don't understand people using webmail on their workstations, especially Gmail. It was cool doing that in 2004, but it got old.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
On the plus side, I keep a Chrome instance just for gmail and now I'm never logged into Google on my primary browser. You will see additional dark patterns from Google properties trying to steer you to log in but this is a battle where I'm the winner.
thedance 7y ago
I don't why people bother with claims like these are are trivially disproven. Anybody reading this can open up Firefox and go to Gmail and see for themselves that it works perfectly well (FF 73, Gmail frontend gmail_fe_200213.13_p5). So whatever your problem is with gmail is either imaginary or caused by some other software you've inflicted on yourself.
josteink 7y ago
> Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. That goes both ways. I’m categorically not replacing Firefox with Chrome, and when Gmail became unbearable in Firefox I switched to something else. Gmail is hardly a unique product, nor uniquely good in 2020, and it haven’t been for quite a few years.
nikofeyn 7y ago
well g-mail still barely works in chrome after the update they did, so i am not sure it's malice in this case.

einr 7y ago

Another thing: every single time I use Google to search for a Firefox extension such as uBlock Origin or anything else that is available on both browsers, the equivalent Chrome extension is consistently the first result. It knows my user agent. It knows very well that the Firefox extension is the relevant result. This is 100% done out of malice.

thrower123 7y ago
I really, really, suspect that the Google search isn't even close to that smart, that active malice comes in. Pure statistics would put the Chrome version of something higher than the Firefox version due to sheer weight of user-base. Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.
- einr 7y ago
  Nor are user-agents in any way reliable. Reliable enough to constantly break, penalize and nag me for using Firefox in other ways, apparently. This happens and is well-documented, not a conspiracy theory.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- simias 7y ago
  I agree with you. Given the current browser market share it would make sense for Chrome extensions to be more popular than Firefox's without any special-case meddling.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    It does surprise me how unpopular this sentiment is. Maybe people don't like the idea that most of the algorithms that they interact with a pretty stupid and just weight things by frequency? It does seem like people attribute considerably more intelligence to algorithms than there actually are there. It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.
    - simias 7y ago
      I don't really get it either, I don't think it's super controversial. I think there's an angry mob going after Google and anything not going in that sense is aggressively downvoted. I think that the anger is justified but it doesn't justify making up poorly substantiated conspiracy theories. The hard facts are enough to see what Google is doing anyway, no need to write fanfiction.
      - einr 7y ago
        Speaking of hard facts, I'm sure that before you decided to call my claim a "poorly substantiated conspiracy theory" you have verified that Google does not alter search results based on user-agent, i.e. by doing the same searches in blank installs of Firefox and Chrome on the same computer, right?

ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago

I'm on the latest version of Firefox and G Suite mail is quite performant indeed. I don't see where you're getting this.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I don't use Gmail anymore as a primary address, but when I do check my old address, Gmail takes up to 30 seconds to load on Firefox. Emails often take several seconds to delete, and if I close the tab a few seconds after deleting the emails, they don't actually get deleted, even if they appear to. I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.
- snazz 7y ago
  That’s something broken with your Firefox install or computer then. It’s very performant on any of my two G Suite and one Gmail accounts on Firefox as well as Chrome.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Or something broken in how Gmail handles a wide variety of Firefox installs/configurations (this is a common reported issue). The fact that you personally haven't seen it ("works on my machine!") doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist.
- hnews_account_1 7y ago
  Interesting. Are you exaggerating a bit here or being accurate with those timelines? Cos Gmail is really slow on Firefox for me too, but it doesn't take half a minute to load. More like 10-15 seconds, which in this day and age is a nonsensical amount of time. Similarly operations have a 2-3 second lag. Noticeable to normal users but people like my parents wouldn't be able to see it.

dahart 7y ago

I love Firefox, but it has had an especially bad habit for years of perf tanking across version upgrades. You should try a full uninstall/reinstall along with a full delete of preferences and cache before assuming that Google has anything to do with Gmail perf on Firefox.

adonese 7y ago

I have been using gmail for quite long time. It is getting ridiculously terrible these days (in the past couple of years I guess!) My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client. It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.

NegativeLatency 7y ago
IMAP still works, you could use a local client
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
I haven't used webmail ui in years, and couldn't be happier. All native application deliver far superior experience, are more performance work offline etc.
- copperx 7y ago
  If only IMAP worked decently in Gmail.
wkey 7y ago
I will have one browser window open, but in my task manager will have like 17 concurrent chrome processes running, slowing things down so much. I understand there are certain things running in the background but it is extremely hard to close out of certain tasks and stop plugins without terminating my entire browsing session.
hnick 7y ago
> It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years. You might enjoy this talk if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

deadbunny 7y ago

Another voice of an unaffected FF user here. Emalis open in sub 1 sec in FF for me, both free Gmail and paid GApps accounts. EVen went back a we pages of emails and clicked at random, all <1 sec easily.

andrewmutz 7y ago

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice" -Hacker News

ineedasername 7y ago
How about: "Sufficient levels of stupidity are indistinguishable from malice"
- Supermancho 7y ago
  Indifference is not stupidity. "My feature is done. I don't care if or how it hurts the user."
  - justinclift 7y ago
    Possible a bad example, as that one sounds incredibly stupid. ;)
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I think indifference is a perfectly good substitute here as well: "Sufficient levels of indifference are indistinguishable from malice". Yep, that works too.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
"Google is a small indie company. Don't be so hard on them." -- Some guy on HN
simias 7y ago
This is a systematic issue with many of Google's services. They have the money and manpower to test their interface on Firefox. We're talking about a modern, generally standard-compliant browser here, not IE6. Getting those websites to perform decently on Firefox shouldn't be a problem for Google. I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).

ineedasername 7y ago

I wonder what would happen if you used Chrome, but changed your user-agent to Firefox? Would the issues reappear?

euix 7y ago

late last year gmail started complaining I had used up all its storage space of 15 GB and asked me to start paying for more storage. That was the last straw, if I am going to pay for email I might as well spend my money and not give away my data for ads and privacy. I signed up for fastmail. Now outside from Android and maps and keep, I am pretty much off google.

sp332 7y ago

This is one of those mysterious things that hits certain people's accounts and not others. Here's a thread with suggestions from 2012. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477361

kingofpandora 7y ago

I use FF exclusively and GMail works just fine - no delays. Not sure what the captcha on Firefox 'feature' refers to but nothing springs to mind as not working in that department either.

swiley 7y ago

Open gmail once with noscript and it will give you the option to switch to the classic interface that actually works. I had to help someone with something the other day and saw the current version of gmail in safari and I feel sorry for anyone that has to use that.

mda 7y ago

Maybe it is about your setup? I actually got curious and tested Firefox with my personal gmail account (using it for >10 years, so it has tons of emails, filters etc). I did not notice any big issues, text rendering seems slightly different, maybe chrome version is slightly snappier but that's it.

bad_user 7y ago

Personally I don't run Gmail in the browser — people complain about running Gmail on top of Firefox, but it has performance issues on top of Chrome too. You get a much better experience with a native app, like MailMate or Thunderbird. I just don't understand people using webmail on their workstations, especially Gmail. It was cool doing that in 2004, but it got old.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

On the plus side, I keep a Chrome instance just for gmail and now I'm never logged into Google on my primary browser. You will see additional dark patterns from Google properties trying to steer you to log in but this is a battle where I'm the winner.

thedance 7y ago

I don't why people bother with claims like these are are trivially disproven. Anybody reading this can open up Firefox and go to Gmail and see for themselves that it works perfectly well (FF 73, Gmail frontend gmail_fe_200213.13_p5). So whatever your problem is with gmail is either imaginary or caused by some other software you've inflicted on yourself.

josteink 7y ago

> Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. That goes both ways. I’m categorically not replacing Firefox with Chrome, and when Gmail became unbearable in Firefox I switched to something else. Gmail is hardly a unique product, nor uniquely good in 2020, and it haven’t been for quite a few years.

nikofeyn 7y ago

well g-mail still barely works in chrome after the update they did, so i am not sure it's malice in this case.