9 ms·
Explain Gmail.
by taeric 5y ago
Explain Gmail.
- Rygian 5y agoGroup 3, clearly. With a bit of the "minimal oversight" thing.
- quelltext 5y agoWhat do you mean?
- bowmessage 5y agoThe search box is that way ^
- zagrebian 5y agoThanks for reminding me why I use HTML Gmail instead. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
- _kblcuk_ 5y agoIt surely loads faster than speed of light, but with all the keyboard navigation missing, it takes 20x more time to go through each email and archive/delete/reply to. Can't have everything, it seems. :/
- taeric 5y agoI find the idea that the keyboard navigation is a measurable part of the site amusing.
- einpoklum 5y ago1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
- rtpg 5y agoBasically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.
- kiwijamo 5y agoAt work I use the macOS Desktop edition of Outlook for my work O365 account and I've found searching to be pretty good and quite fast. I'm pretty sure it just searches the local cache hence the speed. It's pretty good at suggesting email addresses when I type someones name so I can usually quickly find emails from a certain person just by typing the first characters of their name and pressing return when it finds the correct address.
- tacker2000 5y agoOutlook on mac uses Spotlight search internally
- fc_throwaway 5y ago> A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally. But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes. There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.
- interactivecode 5y agoIf you’re on mac mimestream is really good: https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
- mmcnl 5y agoIt's actually not faster than the current modern UI for me.
- fouric 5y agoIt's significantly faster for me on my i3-5010U - 5s for the modern UI and 1s for the HTML UI, unloaded. During startup, or when I'm doing something computationally expensive in the background, that 5s turns into 10s, so that difference becomes even more noticeable.
- rovr138 5y agoWhat specs does your computer/device have?
- mmcnl 5y agoIntel Skylake Core i5-6300u.
- l0b0 5y agoI don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.
- kiwijamo 5y agoI have to use Gmail for work. I've found Gmail to be pretty slow nowdays. From HN comments on other threads I'm not the only one to have noticed this. It even occasionally fails to load and just hangs at the loading screen requiring a refresh and fingers crossed that the second try succeeds in loading my inbox. When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as FastMail). I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic product in its heyday better than any other webmail client at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount especially in recent years to the point there are now viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIndeed, I have Outlook, Yandex and Gmail, and Gmail seems to be the worst of them all. I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it simply brand loyalty?
- danachow 5y agoIt used to be amazing - a pretty full featured mail application, snappy in 2005 on much less sophisticated browser runtimes. It’s relatively a piece of shit now.
- ArnoVW 5y agoThe gmail prototype was made using 20% time. I'd call that "no oversight" as per the third point. Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of the second scenario.
- chefandy 5y agoGmail is an AdTech-funded, no-charge email service operated by Google, a popular internet services subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.