8 ms·

Google's UI's in general are shockingly slow. I don't understand why my Google Drive and Gmail have input lag and choppy animations on my 5 year old xps13, it's

Google's UI's in general are shockingly slow. I don't understand why my Google Drive and Gmail have input lag and choppy animations on my 5 year old xps13, it's not that hard to make navigating a filesystem or list of emails fast. Actually I do understand, it's because they want everything they build to be made in a massive javascript framework with shared components, which looks nice but runs like garbage on anything not modern.

alisonkisk 6y ago
It doesn't look nice. It looks a lot worse than 10-years ago. But it is more compatible with i18n/l10n and accessibility plugins and compatibile components across a dozen chat apps
influx 6y ago
The original gmail design was so fast, beautiful and minimalistic. It had vi key bindings and was close to perfect. The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar! Wtf?!
- GordonS 6y ago
  Keep seems to have gotten slower and slower over the years too - the web version is practically unusable on mobile, not just because the UI design isn't responsive (!), but because it's so painfully slow. Boggles the mind how Google web apps have performance issues like this.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Wait, you think https://mail.google.com/mail/mu https://mail.google.com/mail/mu, the mobile web version aka "superpudu" is slow? Can you tell me your device? It paints itself in only 400ms on my iphone. I actually prefer it over the app because it's so fast.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      My comments were about Google Keep, not Gmail, though I do actually find the Gmail web app pretty slow too - it takes several seconds to send an email. I didn't know there was some kind of secret mobile Web version of Gmail - I get a blank white page when I open your link on mobile tho (using Brave)?
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        Oh, I totally scanned passed "Keep" in your comment. The mobile web version of that does indeed seem a bit rough. It's been a while since I worked at Google but when I did, Keep was a one-engineer project so the amazing thing is it exists at all.
    - wffurr 6y ago
      5.5 sec for that link to show anything other than a blank white page on a Pixel 4a. I thought it was a broken page at first.
- Rompect 6y ago
  FYI you can still switch to the old design. When the fake loading screen (https://smitop.com/post/gmail-s-fake-loading-indicator/ https://smitop.com/post/gmail-s-fake-loading-indicator/) is loading, click on the bottom on "Prefer old design". Then you can set that as default. It is an absolute must for me given how fast it is.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Note that objectively speaking the basic HTML gmail is slower in every aspect, except for the initial page load. Everything but the initial page load is slower. The main web app has extensive latency-hiding features that are key to Gmail's overall performance story. The basic HTML UI has none of these features. Every action in the basic UI takes half a second or more because it's a server round trip. Example: load the basic HTML and enter a thread then return to the thread list. Returning to the thread list takes about 1 second. In the full gmail return to thread list takes no remote time, only local event handler CPU time, it's almost instantaneous. Example 2: Open a thread in the basic UI and use "newer" or "older" to navigate to other threads. Every click takes ~1s. In the full Gmail UI navigate to adjacent thread takes almost no time, because the app pre-loads these threads in anticipation of you visiting them. TL;DR the basic HTML gmail is good if your device is severely resource-poor and you just need to see if you have mail. For every other purpose it's worse.
- raiyu 6y ago
  The original design was done with function first and form received almost no attention which was typical for Google for a long time. As design overall started to become more relevant in products Google started to push out their redesigns but it was done with form instead of function as the focus. They've never really re-designed anything to be better - their updates have usually made the product worse. But without a strong design leader it's death by a thousand cuts because there are so many layers of management to getting anything done.
- kossTKR 6y ago
  Yeah the Gmail UI has become absolute garbage lately. The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible. Send plain HTML, then make JS take over after loading like most modern frameworks can do. .. yes i really have to ditch Google .. On a sidenote YT has also become a dystopian addiction machine - years ago you could easily curate what you saw, feeds, channels etc, now everything is controlled by the "google god skinner box algo" just like i feel Gmail is headed towards with all kinds of automated tools.
  - markdog12 6y ago
    > The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible. They did the same thing for GC UI. They think it tricks the user into thinking it's fast, instead of making it fast.
- SilasX 6y ago
  It still has the pseudo-vi key bindings that you can turn on in settings. I've been really satisfied with how fast it is to do anything because of the key commands + relatively quick response and autocomplete (except click on links because I have to turn off Vimium for Gmail).
- chaos_a 6y ago
  The Inbox by Gmail version loaded instantly, had inline emails and loads of other cool features that got half-arsed forced into the older gmail codebase. Google made a superior replacement to the current gmail experience and then just threw it away like it never existed.
- __alias 6y ago
  FWIW you can select a setting to enable keyboard shortcuts, which are the vi key bindings. I enabled that a while back which makes navigating emails much more pleasant
Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
I noticed this for last few years. Google stuffs been increasingly adding much JS in their stuff every year and that bogging down my system. Even loading Google Drive took average 6 second to fully load whereas it was about 3 seconds last year. YouTube is not quick to load anymore like it was before. And this is all in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
It's all slow because it can be. People will put up with it because they have a virtual monopoly on all these free cloud services. What are people going to do, go back to saving locally and use something like LibreOffice?

alisonkisk 6y ago

It doesn't look nice. It looks a lot worse than 10-years ago. But it is more compatible with i18n/l10n and accessibility plugins and compatibile components across a dozen chat apps

influx 6y ago

The original gmail design was so fast, beautiful and minimalistic. It had vi key bindings and was close to perfect. The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar! Wtf?!

GordonS 6y ago
Keep seems to have gotten slower and slower over the years too - the web version is practically unusable on mobile, not just because the UI design isn't responsive (!), but because it's so painfully slow. Boggles the mind how Google web apps have performance issues like this.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Wait, you think https://mail.google.com/mail/mu https://mail.google.com/mail/mu, the mobile web version aka "superpudu" is slow? Can you tell me your device? It paints itself in only 400ms on my iphone. I actually prefer it over the app because it's so fast.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    My comments were about Google Keep, not Gmail, though I do actually find the Gmail web app pretty slow too - it takes several seconds to send an email. I didn't know there was some kind of secret mobile Web version of Gmail - I get a blank white page when I open your link on mobile tho (using Brave)?
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Oh, I totally scanned passed "Keep" in your comment. The mobile web version of that does indeed seem a bit rough. It's been a while since I worked at Google but when I did, Keep was a one-engineer project so the amazing thing is it exists at all.
  - wffurr 6y ago
    5.5 sec for that link to show anything other than a blank white page on a Pixel 4a. I thought it was a broken page at first.
Rompect 6y ago
FYI you can still switch to the old design. When the fake loading screen (https://smitop.com/post/gmail-s-fake-loading-indicator/ https://smitop.com/post/gmail-s-fake-loading-indicator/) is loading, click on the bottom on "Prefer old design". Then you can set that as default. It is an absolute must for me given how fast it is.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Note that objectively speaking the basic HTML gmail is slower in every aspect, except for the initial page load. Everything but the initial page load is slower. The main web app has extensive latency-hiding features that are key to Gmail's overall performance story. The basic HTML UI has none of these features. Every action in the basic UI takes half a second or more because it's a server round trip. Example: load the basic HTML and enter a thread then return to the thread list. Returning to the thread list takes about 1 second. In the full gmail return to thread list takes no remote time, only local event handler CPU time, it's almost instantaneous. Example 2: Open a thread in the basic UI and use "newer" or "older" to navigate to other threads. Every click takes ~1s. In the full Gmail UI navigate to adjacent thread takes almost no time, because the app pre-loads these threads in anticipation of you visiting them. TL;DR the basic HTML gmail is good if your device is severely resource-poor and you just need to see if you have mail. For every other purpose it's worse.
raiyu 6y ago
The original design was done with function first and form received almost no attention which was typical for Google for a long time. As design overall started to become more relevant in products Google started to push out their redesigns but it was done with form instead of function as the focus. They've never really re-designed anything to be better - their updates have usually made the product worse. But without a strong design leader it's death by a thousand cuts because there are so many layers of management to getting anything done.
kossTKR 6y ago
Yeah the Gmail UI has become absolute garbage lately. The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible. Send plain HTML, then make JS take over after loading like most modern frameworks can do. .. yes i really have to ditch Google .. On a sidenote YT has also become a dystopian addiction machine - years ago you could easily curate what you saw, feeds, channels etc, now everything is controlled by the "google god skinner box algo" just like i feel Gmail is headed towards with all kinds of automated tools.
- markdog12 6y ago
  > The fact that i need to see a cute-dystopian loading animation for 2 seconds each time i reload the page is incredible. They did the same thing for GC UI. They think it tricks the user into thinking it's fast, instead of making it fast.
SilasX 6y ago
It still has the pseudo-vi key bindings that you can turn on in settings. I've been really satisfied with how fast it is to do anything because of the key commands + relatively quick response and autocomplete (except click on links because I have to turn off Vimium for Gmail).
chaos_a 6y ago
The Inbox by Gmail version loaded instantly, had inline emails and loads of other cool features that got half-arsed forced into the older gmail codebase. Google made a superior replacement to the current gmail experience and then just threw it away like it never existed.
__alias 6y ago
FWIW you can select a setting to enable keyboard shortcuts, which are the vi key bindings. I enabled that a while back which makes navigating emails much more pleasant

Isthatablackgsd 6y ago

I noticed this for last few years. Google stuffs been increasingly adding much JS in their stuff every year and that bogging down my system. Even loading Google Drive took average 6 second to fully load whereas it was about 3 seconds last year. YouTube is not quick to load anymore like it was before. And this is all in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

It's all slow because it can be. People will put up with it because they have a virtual monopoly on all these free cloud services. What are people going to do, go back to saving locally and use something like LibreOffice?