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What a massive failure. I wonder if they realized they weren't going to hit the deadline so they decided to do a quick implementation with the tablet app. The

What a massive failure. I wonder if they realized they weren't going to hit the deadline so they decided to do a quick implementation with the tablet app. The old rumors that Gmail is a massive spaghetti mess must be true. Let's just hope they're actively rewriting it and don't think this is good enough.

niels_olson 15y ago
Fun fact, you're the only person here with karma over 100 (2210 when I checked). Your criticism therefore is not only brutal but reputable. There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365). Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?
- corin_ 15y ago
  A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions. In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism. This brings up another issue of reputation vs karma, which I posted separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
      - mkr-hn 15y ago
        What you say matters to the person on the receiving end, even if you think it doesn't.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1] [1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...
  - jorangreef 15y ago
    Yes these technologies have been around for several years. Unfortunately none of them are stable/reliable/easy to reason about. WebSQL (SQLite) has been ignored by Mozilla, on the stated basis that an independent implementation of WebSQL would be too difficult to build. They advocated that a database designed by committee would be better for the web than the most widely deployed database in the world. They deprecated WebSQL before IndexedDB was given a chance to prove itself. Unfortunately they also said that anyone could build SQLite on top of IDB if they chose to. Firefox have implemented IDB on top of SQLite. IDB is at least an order of magnitude slower than SQLite. LocalStorage is capped at approximately 10mb and there are no quota apis to adjust this. It is not likely that this will change and there has been discussion on the Public Web Apps over whether LocalStorage should also be deprecated in favor of IDB. ApplicationCache works well but it's designed for caching code and html and it's not an alternative to IDB. IndexedDB is high-level and "to-do list" friendly. It is not primarily focused on providing library authors with performant low-level storage primitives (BTree, KV) with which to work. The specification is exceedingly complex and so is the API. Chrome has implemented IDB on top of LevelDB which is a terrific storage engine. Exposing something like LevelDB directly would be more useful and make for a powerful, flexible API to boot. IDB has problems with inadvertently capturing application state bubbles. Indexes must be predefined and then migrated at the database layer, the application has no say over indexing. I'm not sure if IDB supports indexing object array values yet. IDB claims to support MVC yet most implementations cause writers to block readers and even readers to block other readers. Edit: Mozilla don't plan to support the FileSystem API. It's not clear that all browsers will provide persistent storage guarantees. At least Mozilla have said that they may treat client-side storage as evict-able at the discretion of the user agent (as opposed to user), rather than as persistent storage. I'm not sure if the specifications have been updated to enforce some kind of guarantee on the part of user agents.
rachelbythebay 15y ago
It's still August. Stuff doesn't get rushed out until the end of a quarter when OKRs are looming. At that point you can push any old thing and get away with it. In other words, check back in a month to see even worse.
Lewisham 15y ago
Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind. I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product. DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.
dannyr 15y ago
Maybe they just want a solution that people can use RIGHT NOW. What's wrong with that? I'm thankful for Google providing this solution though I'm hoping for a better one in the future. Calling it a massive failure is just mean-spirited. You call yourself an "aspiring entrepreneur" but I don't think you understand what it means to be one and actually build stuff. If you do, you wouldn't be making comments like that.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.
  - dannyr 15y ago
    "It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that." Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it? Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down. You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals. You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.
nex3 15y ago
(Offline Gmail team member here) One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection. This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?
  - nex3 15y ago
    I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them. All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.
- blub 15y ago
  I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen. In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".
  - jorangreef 15y ago
    Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.
temphn 15y ago
This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something. Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing. Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.

niels_olson 15y ago

Fun fact, you're the only person here with karma over 100 (2210 when I checked). Your criticism therefore is not only brutal but reputable. There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365). Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?

corin_ 15y ago
A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions. In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism. This brings up another issue of reputation vs karma, which I posted separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
    - mkr-hn 15y ago
      What you say matters to the person on the receiving end, even if you think it doesn't.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1] [1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...
- jorangreef 15y ago
  Yes these technologies have been around for several years. Unfortunately none of them are stable/reliable/easy to reason about. WebSQL (SQLite) has been ignored by Mozilla, on the stated basis that an independent implementation of WebSQL would be too difficult to build. They advocated that a database designed by committee would be better for the web than the most widely deployed database in the world. They deprecated WebSQL before IndexedDB was given a chance to prove itself. Unfortunately they also said that anyone could build SQLite on top of IDB if they chose to. Firefox have implemented IDB on top of SQLite. IDB is at least an order of magnitude slower than SQLite. LocalStorage is capped at approximately 10mb and there are no quota apis to adjust this. It is not likely that this will change and there has been discussion on the Public Web Apps over whether LocalStorage should also be deprecated in favor of IDB. ApplicationCache works well but it's designed for caching code and html and it's not an alternative to IDB. IndexedDB is high-level and "to-do list" friendly. It is not primarily focused on providing library authors with performant low-level storage primitives (BTree, KV) with which to work. The specification is exceedingly complex and so is the API. Chrome has implemented IDB on top of LevelDB which is a terrific storage engine. Exposing something like LevelDB directly would be more useful and make for a powerful, flexible API to boot. IDB has problems with inadvertently capturing application state bubbles. Indexes must be predefined and then migrated at the database layer, the application has no say over indexing. I'm not sure if IDB supports indexing object array values yet. IDB claims to support MVC yet most implementations cause writers to block readers and even readers to block other readers. Edit: Mozilla don't plan to support the FileSystem API. It's not clear that all browsers will provide persistent storage guarantees. At least Mozilla have said that they may treat client-side storage as evict-able at the discretion of the user agent (as opposed to user), rather than as persistent storage. I'm not sure if the specifications have been updated to enforce some kind of guarantee on the part of user agents.

rachelbythebay 15y ago

It's still August. Stuff doesn't get rushed out until the end of a quarter when OKRs are looming. At that point you can push any old thing and get away with it. In other words, check back in a month to see even worse.

Lewisham 15y ago

Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind. I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product. DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.

dannyr 15y ago

Maybe they just want a solution that people can use RIGHT NOW. What's wrong with that? I'm thankful for Google providing this solution though I'm hoping for a better one in the future. Calling it a massive failure is just mean-spirited. You call yourself an "aspiring entrepreneur" but I don't think you understand what it means to be one and actually build stuff. If you do, you wouldn't be making comments like that.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.
- dannyr 15y ago
  "It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that." Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it? Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down. You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals. You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.

nex3 15y ago

(Offline Gmail team member here) One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection. This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?
- nex3 15y ago
  I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them. All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.
blub 15y ago
I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen. In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".
- jorangreef 15y ago
  Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.

temphn 15y ago

This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something. Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing. Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.