Something else that bothers me immensely about such interfaces (admittedly i avoid Google mail but i have another paid email service with a similarly misguided

Something else that bothers me immensely about such interfaces (admittedly i avoid Google mail but i have another paid email service with a similarly misguided modern web UI) is that my browser blocks @font-face CSS directives (security-motivated), and these days the fashion is to load “icons” from external fonts. This leaves me with a Unicode box-character, forcing me to hover over buttons to discover their meaning, or guessing based on their placement. I would go as far as to say that this trend (of fonts-as-resource-repositories) is perhaps my least favourite Web n.0 evolution: most evils (e.g., popups, blinking lights, horrible stylesheets) i can circumvent relatively effectively with NoScript or whatever, but this truly has me stumped. Needless to say i use a proper email client on my own machine as much as possible, but obviously this isn't an option 100% of the time.