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This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Google SWE friend last year about the new gmail interface. I complained that the default settings looked terrible, and that there was barely any space for actual content. He said he disagreed and that everyone he worked with thought it looked great. He eventually realized I was using a 13" macbook air, and said "oh, we all use 27" monitors and macbook retinas". Yeah, not so helpful for me :(

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GMail is obnoxiously slow on most of the computers in my house; none of which are more than five years old. Several laptops, a few media players, et al. It's even slow on my new tablet when I use the desktop interface (because the mobile interface lacks necessary features). Chrome and Firefox both soar to max a core and cause the fans to scream for a good half minute while loading the page, then navigation and manipulation is excruciatingly unresponsive.

It's the same for most of Google's web services. They built them for themselves, and neglected to assure that they would work on the majority of the install base of PCs. It reflects poorly on Google's software development process and the quality of its management.

The same thing can be said about Chrome. I was previously on 3gb ram. It ran so fucking slow. Firefox was much better. Now I added on 8gb and chrome runs very fast is more responsive than Firefox. The first thing that came to my mind was that developers have optimized for their own environment rather than what most users have.

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