Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a decently

Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a decently fast machine on a 100MB/5MB connection with low latency). And that's before the pause and the load of the Hangouts widget. Loading the /h/ variant of email is under 2 seconds. My Rackspace mail webmail comes up in about 3. All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts because a real email client is faster than webmail.