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Gmail – A New Integrated Layout
- hestefisk 5y agoIt’s quite tiring how often they change this. Gmail is a horrible, cluttered, and slow UI. I have started migration to my own mail server with opensmtpd, dovecote, mutt and Rainloop for web mail.
- theK 5y agoDid this exact thing 13 (wow! Time flies) years ago and never looked back! You have to put in the hours but you know that you run that stuff! Even after four major migrations (roughly one weekend every 3 years) and all the bullying from the big hosts to accept your mail I still wouldn’t change my mind!
- alentred 5y agoIf the major concern is the UI, not the Gmail server, using another email client (desktop email client) is an easier solution. There is a big gap between using another client and setting up a new email server altogether. An alternative may be also paying another email provider, and probably setting up your own domain name for it, for easier migration eventually.
- compiler-guy 5y agoI shudder at the amount of retraining non technically sophisticated users will need. The doctors, teachers, and everyday people who just want their e-mail to work so they can worry about their real jobs will all have some annoying cognitive load forced on them for reasons that benefit Google and not them.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'm starting to see real problems with the continuous upgrade way of life. Giving people clearer and longer cycle of use seems healthier (especially for non tech savvy people). Less random surprises, less regressions, less relearning, and when it needs to happen there's one clear hurdle to climb, if you want it.
- Majestic121 5y agoI think there is multiple stages in technology. A quick growth stage, typically when the subject is still new and being explored, and where a continuous or very regular upgrade is the best strategy. For example, smartphones or computers were evolving so much still not that long ago, that keeping one for more than 3 years was rare, and costing a lot in term of usability. And then, there's a cooling down phase, when the evolution is much slower, and gains are few and far between. In this context, a consolidation strategy is better, and if one keeps the previous strategy, you can end up with changes that feel forced and are not actually evolution, but just something pushed because one has to push new things constantly.
- nerdponx 5y agoOne of many great reasons to care about open protocols and the ability to use third-party client applications. Software freedom (protocol freedom? interface freedom?) has _practical_ benefits for the public good. Attempts to deviate towards closed systems and protocols should generally be viewed as monopolistic antisocial rent-seeking by default, in my opinion.
- fartcannon 5y agoI genuinely despise google. But this argument that people shouldn't need to learn things ever is what entrenches google, and Microsoft in our lives.
- na_other 5y ago
- thecrumb 5y agoAnother Google 'enhanced user experience' which I will hate.
- clement_b 5y ago> Important: To use the new view, you must turn on Chat in Gmail and set Chat to the left hand panel. Learn how to turn on Chat in Gmail. "c'mon, use our messaging products again"
- fitblipper 5y agoI guess its good to know how to avoid getting pulled into yet another UI refresh that I do not want. Google's new chat system doesn't appeal to me even a little bit.
- ainar-g 5y agoHow many of these have they killed already? Google Talk, Google Pie, Google Plus to an extent. Which ones am I missing?
- justanothstr 5y agoGoogle Hangouts, Google Allo, &c. The list goes on.
- taeric 5y agoI want to say this is a tired complaint. But it just keeps hitting true. Just, wow.
- blibble 5y agoit's guess time for the $PROMOTION_CYCLE periodic redesign!
- toomuchtodo 5y agoIs there any way to alleviate the problem of these forced UX transitions? At the time, Gmail was pretty revolutionary for what it offered (a large, free email account), but as the cost of compute and storage has declined, its pretty cheap to store 10GB-15GB of email in an mbox file or similar data store, fronted with JMAP [1], which any client or web front end that supports it could talk to. Is asking for long term support of a fronend (~10 years) unreasonable as long as the underlying API version is still supported? [1] https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/ (fastmail user, no other affiliation)
- asddubs 5y agohtml gmail works. You used to be able to set it as your default view (well, you still can technically), but they stopped respecting that setting and just send you to the javascript one now anyway. Still, if you change your URL manually after logging in (and possibly answer a prompt of "do you really want to use html gmail?" with yes), you can still get to it, and it's the same interface as ever.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago> Still, if you change your URL manually after logging in You can also bookmark the modified URL, or (what I do) have it always open as an "unloaded"/suspended tab that you can click to load.
- asddubs 5y agoyes, although if you have to login (which i do because my cookies clear on each browser reload), it will still redirect you to the javascript gmail after logging in, even if you came from the html-gmail URL. Really they just need to respect the html-as-default setting. I doubt they even broke it on purpose, it's just that nobody at google cares about it. And of course, trying to report any sort of issue to google is a lost cause. either it affects huge swaths of people and they find out about it themselves, or you're just fucked
- jeffbee 5y ago
- emptybottle 5y agoDear Google: please leave well enough alone
- uncertainrhymes 5y agoI am not associated with this product, but a very happy customer. https://simpl.fyi/about https://simpl.fyi/about It is a plugin that emulates some of the now-removed Inbox functionality, and generally makes Gmail more pleasant to deal with.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y agoWhy not switch to a paid-for email provider? Not only Google cares about locking you in their platform (they need your eyeballs) but they also intend to use your data against you (to influence your purchase decision and provide more pricing leverage to sellers).
- Jtsummers 5y agoHow many (HN) Gmail users still use the Gmail interface? I remember giving up on it as a primary interface in the mid-to-late '00s, my laptop was crappy and the interface had slowed down so much that it was nearly unusable. There was visible lag while typing a message on my circa 2003 cheap HP laptop (I was a student, it was what I could afford). It was like getting sent back to 1996 and typing out documents in Word on a 486 (In 1996, I was only typing at 30 wpm and would easily get ahead of the system. Type up a paragraph, sit back and wait while it appeared on screen.) I've only used it since when needing to type a long form email or grab some critical information from an email while traveling and borrowing a friend or family member's computer. I haven't even done that in years thanks to smartphones.
- sundarurfriend 5y agoIt wasn't as early as mid-to-late '00s, but it has definitely been a few years since I've used the Javascript version of Gmail. It used to be snappy and responsive back when it was introduced (when Gmail was the cool new thing), but in recent years it has been a resource hog to a level that its features cannot justify. HTML-only Gmail for quick update checks/read-only usage, local email clients for anything more complex I need to do.
- mattarm 5y agoI suspect the answer is "a whole lot of us".
- chriswarbo 5y agoMy preference is using isync (IMAP) to a local folder, and interacting via mu4e (inside Emacs). If I don't have terminal/SSH access, I'll use the "basic HTML" view.
- mixedmath 5y agoI gave up pretty recently, within the last 5 years. My travel computer struggled to handle use of slack and gmail at the same time. When I transitioned away from the gmail app, I also transitioned away from using gmail as my primary account. (Though this took a rather long time to completely migrate). I used the gmail app on my phone over IMAP for much longer, but stopped that when some update made it so that I couldn't send plaintext emails from my phone anymore. All emails were html --- and I detest html email. There is one exception. When I want to search old emails, I'll open up gmail and search. I don't have a good search setup for my old emails.
- bastardoperator 5y agoNobody cares about google chat, I have it set to auto respond with a message that says use slack. If people were looking for an excuse to move, this might be the catalyst. Training a non-technical workforce can cost millions, so maybe we switch to something else people don't need to be trained on. WTF is Google thinking...
- jfb 5y agoIt's promotion packet season at Google again, I see.
- nicoburns 5y agoI just wish they'd fix the performance. The bizarre thing is that it used to be fast while offering more or less the same functionality with more or less the same interface, and it's actually regressed. I'm not sure what on earth they have done, but they're doing something objectively wrong.
- amelius 5y agoStop messing with my UX! Stability is a feature!
- stronglikedan 5y agoAt least this one wasn't foisted upon us with no choice to revert. And since I'll never enable the Chat that this requires, it never will be.
- djanogo 5y agoThey had right button panel and top right app menu button which shows panel of icons, I guess those are projects under different teams?, so new team starts adding panel on left side. The design reflects team/org chart, just as you would expect in a big org.
- xd1936 5y agoStill can't get over how they threw away Inbox[1]. That should have been the new default for everybody, not thrown away. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail
- imchillyb 5y agoInbox was a data-gathering nightmare for our 3-Letter spy orgs. Inbox wasn't killed for lack of users. Hangouts, Inbox, and most of Google's prior messaging platforms were terminated due to lack of centralized data-gathering of the most important data sets. This is old news though.
- xmprt 5y agoInbox was pretty much just a new frontend to Gmail. Why would it impede in any data-gathering if that was Google's goal?
- xmprt 5y agoThe decision to get rid of Inbox smells like a lot of office politics. Someone probably create Inbox as a fun new 20% project and then it took off with a massive customer base that was eating into Gmail's metrics and so they decided to kill it.
- Hurdy 5y agoLiterally the opposite is true. Inbox had a huge team (bigger than Gmail) and while it was loved a lot by some, it never gained much traction among the regular Gmail users, and it'd have been impossible to migrate the enormous Gmail customer base over.
- agnivade 5y ago>it never gained much traction among the regular Gmail users, Do you have any metrics to support that? I haven't met a single person who disliked Inbox.
- 5y ago
- Tepix 5y agoIt's funny that right now there isn't a single comment that mentions something positive about the new interface. It's either completely terrible or - more likely - people hate change.
- dbbk 5y agoSome changes are good. The new Facebook rewrite and redesign is good. The new Google Meet design is good. This isn't.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoSweet, now I can get the worthless Meet tab directly in the web version. Can't wait for it to only be GMail and Meet and have no other apps, because their enterprise offerings (with other worthless apps) cause changes to everything else.
- renewiltord 5y agoFascinating to me that Gmail is not an app platform yet. Could be huge.
- spzb 5y agoMy response to any Google announcement these days is "What's in it for Google?". I used to love Google when it was a scrappy startup with amazing tech, now I just assume they're trying new ways to shaft me.
- bobbob1921 5y agoGmail used to offer major up changes as a option u had to enable/turn on. I wish they would go back to this. I’m now dreading the many calls/texts I’ll get today asking how to switch back to the old gmail. (Side note- how is it that the leader in search, STILL does not support wildcard or partial word searching in gmail)
- fmakunbound 5y agoIs it any faster after this? I’m using Fastmail which is snappy to navigate around in and not sluggish when I type.
- qwedf 5y agoYou know what would be an awesome user setting? -Under no circumstances do I want your update unless it's to circumvent a genuine security threat or addresses a genuine pain point that real users complain about on HN, Reddit or, if it exists, your user forums
- FerretFred 5y agoI ditched (all of) Google 2 weeks ago after 15+ years of having an account. I don't miss it. One of the last major annoyances before I escaped was the ever-decreasing amount of screen-real-estate that seemed to be available to actually use: this new eye-candy version seems to confirm that continuing trend, so I'm happy to be out of it.
- Joeri 5y agoSo, what is the fundamental difference for me as a user between google chat's integration into gmail, and google talk's integration into gmail that they added back in 2006 and removed 7 years later? Both were chat features that allowed me to talk with my contacts. https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/07/screen-shots-of-gmail-chat/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/07/screen-shots-of-gmail-chat... It seems google has gone full circle and is building things they've already built and killed once before. I don't particularly mind, I'm just not going to rely on any of this stuff because in a few years they will kill it and replace it by something else.
- dbbk 5y agoThey highlight the "app main menu" on the left, but say nothing about an identical app menu on the right? Why do both exist?
- XCSme 5y agoI like Gmail, but I am slowly migrating to Protonmail, exposing all my purchases and personal details to an ad company sounds wrong.