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Google will retire Gmail’s Basic HTML view in January 2024
- bullen 3y agoSo now we have a deadline to move! Great opportunity to de-google permanently.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- greenyoda 3y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243
- asicsp 3y agoAlso being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 (2 hours ago, 54 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 (5 days back, 101 comments)
- pvg 3y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 earlier today, previously also a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372
- TrackerFF 3y agoRecently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available - for those that don’t know, the rates are eye watering. $4 pr MB - and the onboard Wi-Fi was either completely down, or down in the low tens Kbps speed. The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference. With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.
- trustingtrust 3y agoNot an extreme case. There are times when I can barely get above 100kbps in spotty areas in some buildings. Loading the gmail web page is painful. HTML button appears immediately at the bottom while the website is struggling to load and clicking it will load emails. Very helpful if you ask me.
- eviks 3y agoBut the fast and small alternative is skipping the web, e.g. set IMAP to a native app
- kubb 3y agoExactly, a workaround exists and is already installed on your device.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoUsing an IMAP client is not an option on many devices, especially when it is a public or borrowed device.
- rini17 3y agoIt is incredibly inconvenient to log in on such device, especially if your primary one isn't available. I ended up writing down backup authenticator codes in my diary. Of course it kinda defeats the purpose and of course it's hard for users to figure out.
- seer 3y agoOne of my employers disabled IMAP on gmail, siting security concerns… ended up pretty much not using email because of that (relying on slack mostly)
- jowea 3y agoWhat's the security disadvantage of IMAP?
- bobse 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- prirai 3y agoGood idea to just use imap clients using auth2, eg Thunderbird.
- nunodonato 3y agoOr switch to a better email... Like fastmail
- 0x073 3y agoI tried fastmail because I need labels, but as an european who want the data on eu server that's as bad as gmail. The best solution would be jmap but it seems dead, most implementations are dead and not compatible with the last version.
- ktosobcy 3y agoI switched to infomaniak (Swiss, from mailbox.org that I used just after Google, but it had way to many quirks). I very much recommend infomaniak.
- pacman2 3y agoCould you please elaborate? I had infomaniak email with external (non infomaniak) domain. They don't seem to offer plain email hosting anymore. Please advise.
- ktosobcy 3y agoIf you take a look at https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail/prices https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail/prices there is still "Mail Service 1,85 € / month" at the end
- jazzyjackson 3y agoLooks like they bundle it, looking into for myself now https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ykonstant 3y agoI was never able to get my mail without HTML view. I don't know how the settings work, but they don't appear. Probably doing something dumb, but I went to the "support forum", followed their instructions, and still nothing. Of course they never replied afterwards. So, if google kills HTML view, I am fully migrating to protonmail or something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sylware 3y agoThis is hypocrit: years ago they forced the usage of a Big Tech web engine in order to "re-authenticate" your account, so you noscript/basic (x)html was broken years ago. This is a dark pattern, stuff which justifies to fine those companies at their scale and to force them to keep interop with small tech via regulation. Personally, I did quit gmail at that time and I am now self-hosted.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI use an old version of palemoon (FF fork) with all script disabled and plain HTML works fine as of right now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- corbezzoli 3y agoYou could argue that Gmail’s new UI is slow. That’s fine and correct. Arguing that they should maintain an outdated view forever seems to forget that that’s not how any of the web works. It’s already weird that the view survived past 2009
- SanderNL 3y agoGoogle maintaining or not maintaining something is completely orthogonal to “how any of the web works”. I see no point here.
- corbezzoli 3y agoAbsolutely not. Why would they support this view? It makes no financial sense. Google kills whole successful products, what made you think that they would support alternative UIs used by dozens of us?
- troupo 3y agoIt's only an alternative view because Google made it alternative. And made the main view a bloated slow abomination.
- corbezzoli 3y agoThat’s irrelevant. I already mentioned that the new view is slow and that’s a fine argument to make. Arguing that they should maintain multiple views is just ignorant of the world we live in. You will be disappointed further.
- troupo 3y agoNo. I'm arguing that it's Google's deliberate choice, and we should be angry about that. Whether or not a trillion-dollar company with 170 000 employees can afford to maintain two views for a product with 2 billion MAU or make it not suck, now that is really irrelevant.
- chrismsimpson 3y agoThe web without JavaScript is dead. Next Google will deprecate <noscript>.
- numpad0 3y agoAOL was right having its own browser for Web.
- sambazi 3y agocontent heavy sites mostly work fine w/o .js (nope, video is not a dense format neither are podcasts)
- sublinear 3y agoI hope you're being facetious. Deprecating any tags in the post HTML5 world requires WHATWG approval and noscript is more of a fallback mechanism than a "security" feature or means to convey an opinion. There's no good reason to get rid of it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> and noscript is more of a fallback mechanism That is exactly the good reason to get rid of it, for Google. Why would they want to allow a fallback to script-less web?
- chrismsimpson 3y agoExactly. Once they can lock everyone into a JS only world, they can maintain their position as the only viable web index.
- sublinear 3y agoCreating a page that doesn't display content without javascript is literally the single worst thing you can do for SEO on Google or any search engine. Noscript has nothing to do with the issue you all are talking about.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoGoogle lost messaging and social network but Google won email and owns it. Now I don’t know how, because email is much more fragmented than XMPP, but they’ll do that it with Gmail as well. They have already been doing that by blocking providers at whims and fancy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- a1o 3y agoHey, I really want Gmail alternatives, is the best approach going for Apple Icloud account? Are there better services that are expected to last a long time? Thanks!
- toxik 3y agoI think few people use iCloud for email.
- kergonath 3y agoI do, and I am happy with it. I don’t use the Web interface very often but it does the job just fine when I need it. It certainly does not have many features Gmail has, though. Some bits of iCloud are wonky but email works just fine.
- olavfosse 3y agoSource? Anecdotally many people do. It's actually quite good imo considering the native GUI and features like hide-my-email.
- yett 3y agoI've been using iCloud since they announced support for custom domains. You can have up to 5 custom domains, catch all and 3 aliases for each domain as low as $0.99/mo
- toxik 3y agoFirst time I hear about them having custom domains, interesting.
- ycombinete 3y agoI’ve used Fastmail for 5 years, and I’ve been quite happy.
- mtillman 3y agoI bought a full fast mail account to try it out. It seemed pretty insecure coming from protonmail. They require location data for example. No need for that I can think of for the user. They also don’t do E2E or even what passes for e2e. I wasn’t super impressed at the time. I’ll have to log back in and see if any of it changed.
- ktosobcy 3y agoI'm so glad I started using own domain for mail (still at Google a decade ago) and then migrated off Google a couple years ago...
- YeBanKo 3y agoWhat email do you use for your domain registration?
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoNot the previous commenter, but I do a similar thing. I have a (promised to be) lifetime email address through my graduating university that I use as the domain registration. It's been good for over 20 yrs now.
- bpk 3y agoI don't know the setup at your graduating university, but I am aware of some universities who are just now starting to rethink "lifetime" alumni email. They are using email service provided by Big Tech and the reason is simple: Big Tech is starting to charge more for these email accounts and once that starts happening (which it is), the universities can't afford to offer many thousands of alumni email accounts anymore. For those universities that have gone with an authentication vendor (including two-factor providers), the costs are increasing for that too.
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoThey are on Microsoft email now and have been for probably ten years if I remember right, so I will have to keep an eye out for that. Thanks for the heads up. When I was there it was their own POP/IMAP/SMTP server.
- guraf 3y agoFYI if you use your country ccTLD instead of .com, the agency in charge will help you recover a domain even if you lose access to your registrar somehow. Just make sure that your whois is always accurate (whois is rarely public for cctld, no reason to put fake info).
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- greybox 3y agoSo glad I moved to proton mail so I don't have to deal with these shenanigans
- kdmccormick 3y agoEh, ProtonMail's new view is very JS heavy and pretty slow to load, with no simple HTML fallback AFAIK.
- ionwake 3y agoProtonMail doesn’t allow forwarding unless you pay tho
- protonmail 3y agoHi! Note that this is not true - all Proton users can use our EasySwitch to set up email forwarding from Gmail to Proton Mail: https://proton.me/easyswitch https://proton.me/easyswitch. When it comes to forwarding from other email providers, here's how you can do it: https://proton.me/support/mail-forwardingpop3 https://proton.me/support/mail-forwardingpop3. This functionality is also available to all Proton users, free or paying.
- ionwake 3y agoHi ProtonMail I meant forward from ProtonMail to other email addresses. Please correct me if I’m wrong, sorry I wasn’t clear you provide a great service and I am thankful.
- GuB-42 3y agoI would even say that ProtonMail would be impossible without JS. The big idea with ProtonMail is end-to-end encryption, so that Proton can't read your email. Among the things such a guarantee makes impossible is a simple HTML view, because it would require the Proton-controlled server to decrypt your email before generating the HTML page. It also makes traditional protocols like SMTP, POP and IMAP unusable. For that Proton provides a local gateway so that you can use your favorite email client, but Proton servers can't offer such a feature without breaking E2EE.
- Gud 3y agoDump g-mail. Get yourself a domain name, a third party mail provider and forward your gmails. Google sucks, they’re no longer the tech company there were 20 years ago. They’re an advertisement business.
- mikro2nd 3y agoCan highly recommend Migadu for those geeky enough to handle their own DNS setup. No affiliation with them except as a very satisfied customer.
- rc_mob 3y agoI tried, used it for like a year. I found the conversation view to be no where near as good as gmail. The ui in general just was far below gmail. So in the end I slithered back on over to gmail. Also, I remember auto-filters not working very well and not putting my emails in the right folders
- rakoo 3y agoThe webmail provided by migadu is just one client, there are a dozens out there much better for using emails. Migadu's service is not an interface, it's emails.
- gabrielgio 3y ago> The webmail provided by migadu TIL. I have been using migadu for more than an year and I didn't know they have one.
- allarm 3y agoI just don't understand it. On the one hand, you can lose access to your mails and have almost no way of getting them back if you use GMail. On the other hand, you have an alternative but still stay with Google because their interface is better? I use an alternative and I don't care about the interface - it's good enough. I can read and write emails, there is human support, that's all I need from my email provider. I'd probably be happier if they had a better interface, but it's really not that important. I'm not judging it, that's your choice, but I just find it strange.
- YesThatTom2 3y agoWhy does anyone care? Are you using a browser from 1999? I don’t get it.
- ghusbands 3y agoIt's far more accessible for screen readers than the standard HTML view. It's also more responsive, a lot of the time.
- ionwake 3y agoI can’t fathom a person on hackernews confused about why people would like low bandwidth efficiency
- crabbone 3y agoI wouldn't care if I could use GMail from Emacs, but Google makes it increasingly more difficult to do that (and for some -- impossible) because they want their users to use the Web version over which they have more control. The new version of GMail has a lot of anti-features, s.a. bad text editor, uses too much screen for things I don't care about, it interacts very poorly with screen readers and any kind of automation / plugins that imitate user input (eg. I use Surfingkeys and simply selecting an email, as in "clicking" the checkbox is a game of whack-a-mole). I mean, it's just all around worse from functionality perspective. Why would I want that?
- jowea 3y agoMuch lighter and more responsive and uses a lot less RAM. I can't reasonably keep the normal viewer open in an 4GB RAM computer together with other tabs and programs. And I suspect a 2GB computer would just explode on the normal viewer even if that was the only tab open.
- nunez 3y agoIt matters when you're on a super slow connection and _need_ access to email
- JamesLeonis 3y ago> Why does anyone care? ... I don't get it. Because I'm tired of watching infrastructure I've relied on for a decade+ go up in flames. I'm tired of constantly migrating services because investors need their 25 basis points. Between the Google Workspaces debacle and the recent selling off of their domain registrar, it makes me wonder how much longer any Google service will exist. I'm tired of Enshittification.
- Kozmik1 3y agoI was in Cape Town, South Africa last week working from my mobile hotspot during one of the rolling power blackouts and Gmail and Slack on the web browser were both so slow they were effectively dead. I was hunting around (with poor connectivity) and for the life of me could not find the link to the HTML version of gmail from my laptop. I supposedly had "5G" from my T-Mobile International Data Pass. Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town. I still received mail through my IMAP connections and we switched to Whatsapp for work communications, which appears to be stable for most any low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity situation. Through my 1 week in Africa I didn't miss any messages at all on Whatsapp and was able to send messages any time I had signal. Whatsapp voice calls worked pretty well. Slack on my mobile seemed to work but I was not sure if it was synching in real time. Slack voice calls I was told were pretty bad from my side. We've seen a huge rise in Whatsapp use recently when working in our colleagues in less developed areas. I initially loathed dealing with "yet another messaging app" when people started using Whatsapp, but it's great to see a tool that's robust enough to work in non-optimal connectivity.
- niutech 3y agoWhy use Whatsapp which is not private and owned by Meta? Better use Signal or Delta Chat: https://delta.chat https://delta.chat
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIsn’t email even more reliable then Whatsapp?
- navane 3y agoNot when the web Gmail client requires 40mb of crust just to read or send 1kb messages
- diffeomorphism 3y agoSo why use the web client instead of a proper desktop one?
- drpixie 3y agoWeb mail was great before mobile data became normal - when you used a work computer, and a home computer, and ...remember... internet cafes! But now mobile data is normal. Your phone/tablet's email is a almost certainly a dedicated app - an actual email client. Time to drop webmail, and gmail.
- jeanlucas 3y agoI'm glad you live in a place where you can rely on mobile data that much. Here where I am it varies too much and sometimes I still get 3G when lucky
- usea 3y agoThis might be a reasonable view for very specific market fragments. Like if your market is only rich city-dwellers in California or something. But for the general case, it's absolutely false. People struggle with connectivity and bandwidth all day, all over the world.
- drpixie 3y agoI accept your point that good mobile data is not universal. But for those who have a personal mobile device and poor mobile data, an actual email client would likely be a good choice. An actual email client uses much less data than webmail. For example the gmail webpage loads around 10MB just to show the web page, before any actual email content. Also an email client functions with an intermittent network, only actual sending/receiving requires a data connection. Existing emails are accessed using the local mailbox, and outgoing emails are queued until the network becomes available. A webmail system provides no functionality in the absence of network data.
- endisneigh 3y agowhatever. anyone who really cares about this would use their own client and POP which is even more bandwidth efficient than going to an HTML-only site as you're downloading the bare minimum necessary.
- thefounder 3y agoYou may experience issues with imap/pop/smtp in some parts of the world on some specific providers (i.e Dubai,UAE). That's how I rediscovered the web email client.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoFor a large majority, this is simply not an option.
- hnarn 3y agowhy?
- forgotmypw17 3y agoTwo common scenarios are not knowing how to set it up, and not owning the device and thus not having the access to do it.
- kweingar 3y agoI am struggling to understand why this would be the case. Maybe if a large majority of people do not own a device and have to use a borrowed computer, this could be a problem. But (as far as I know) most Android phones ship with a mail client, and so does Windows.
- guraf 3y agoAndroid nowadays only ships with Gmail app. It can do generic IMAP but it's never been clear to me if the process is entirely on-device. I'd rather not keep Google in the loop. That said there are some generic mail clients for Android. Not many are good, but they're out there. K-9 has recently received some love again.
- homarp 3y agosee also this previous discussion "Ask HN: Migadu? Postale? Mxroute? Or any other mail services using this model?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31143847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31143847
- aperture147 3y agoThis change will affect people in the poor countries where people don't have high speed internet and fast computer.
- kweingar 3y agoI am confused by the reaction to this. It seems like the only people adversely affected by this would be people who rely on borrowing others’ devices and therefore cannot use a native mail client. The discussion here is centered on bandwidth and accessibility, and both of those problems are solved by using the mail client that (almost definitely) shipped with your device.
- belter 3y agoYou seem to be conflating computing with mobile devices and that makes me sad...
- kweingar 3y agoNot at all! Where do you get that impression? Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions ship with mail clients that you can set up to use with Gmail. I wonder how many people on earth are accessing webmail from a device that does not have a mail client installed.
- carlosjobim 3y agoAll desktop and mobile operating systems come with native email clients.
- jsnell 3y agoThe set of people adversely affected is even smaller than that: it's people who would actually use the basic HTML in the future, which can be closely approximated by the people who use it now. Google knows the numbers for that, we don't. But it's striking how few "I use this UI in situation X" comments this story and its duplicates have. Most of the comments are by people who at best imagine it would be something they'd use, but actually don't. (And at worst the comments are by people who don't know what the basic HTML UI was, but are here to complain about other aspects of gmail.)
- Hates_ 3y agoOne use case is the web view allows you to check emails of a workspace that requires a Google Device policy to be installed to use the native apps. Of course, the simple solution is to be given a workplace phone or don't check emails when away from a computer.
- sershe 3y agoOne of my few non-libertarian opinions of "how things should be" is that somebody should find an ADA angle to make sites requiring scripting completely illegal, with very narrow exceptions like games. Equivalent functionality in HTML, or pay damages cause screen readers, or something. I the site with the complexity of GMail can do it, so can vast majority of the internet. Modern Javascript functionality on an average site adds as much value as sparks chasing the mouse pointer in the nineties, and appear to be developed by people with, again on average, even less aptitude for software.
- wand3r 3y agoHonestly curious what Google's plan is. With 0 developer confidence and increasingly user hostile actions like killing stadia, removing adblock and now this; to name a few, what is there plan? Their moat is being eroded. There search sucks and is designed around their ad business. GPT search is going to basically erode this moat. Its like they are trying to be IBM. There are obviously other profit centers but this company is really losing its footing
- luxuryballs 3y agoSuch an intriguing observation that I must propose henceforth IBM is redefined to mean this. A swollen tech company, once emergent and perhaps built from defining a new market but now reduced to trying to maximize profit without the original spirit, now trying to be too many things at once in a search party style chase to sustain growth (even if only to beat inflation), ends up becoming just another “international business machine”. IBM is like the Roman Empire of tech history now, the “citizens” eventually betrayed when their previously untouchable pension fund was sacked and squandered by new management after the original President who enshrined it had passed away.
- dang 3y agoGoogle ending Basic HTML support for Gmail in 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243 - Sept 2023 (66 comments) Tell HN: Goodbye HTML Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 - Sept 2023 (109 comments)