I haven't used Gmail for a couple years now, but when I decided to leave, it was slow. Loading the page took awhile, sifting through emails felt sluggish, etc.

I haven't used Gmail for a couple years now, but when I decided to leave, it was slow. Loading the page took awhile, sifting through emails felt sluggish, etc. Nothing like JIRA or other really slow sites, but just enough to be noticeable and annoying. Like I could "feel" the JS-heavy frontend doing more than it needs to in order to display a list of emails, or show a single one. Meanwhile it's nagging me on the left to add contacts to my GTalk, or Hangouts, or whatever they keep renaming that thing to. The whole tabbed inbox thing didn't really help me. There are some "promotional" emails that I want to see in my main inbox, but most I don't. But with the tab system, I still have to check it all the time to avoid missing the ones I care about. So instead of decluttering things, I now have more places to click on to see what I have. There was something about them disabling Exchange support a few years back. This made emails arrive much slower in my inbox on my iOS native client. I can't remember the specifics of that, or if IMAP is now functionally equivalent, but I don't care anymore. And I just really would like to see my inbox and the currently-selected message at the same time. AFAIK, you have to choose between the message list or a single message; can't see both. ------- So, after typing all that, I just logged into it again to see if my complaints held up. It seems faster now. I discovered I can disable the tabbed inbox (probably always could). I can enable a right reading pane (probably always could), and change the theme to a dark background (again...). I got it almost looking like my Fastmail setup. But they're 2 years too late, and the font rendering is kinda crappy on my non-HiDPI external display anyway So I guess now the only reason I don't use Gmail anymore is because Google.