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I use gmail's Basic HTML interface all the time. AJAXy gmail and Inbox balloon to incredible levels of memory use pretty quickly, and are slower for most interactions than the full-page loads on Basic HTML, which means that someone somewhere lost track of WTF they were supposed to be doing all of this for.

It's easily worth the loss of a couple features.

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This is commonly stated but not true under all conditions. The full-blown GMail UI has extensive latency-hiding capabilities. The basic HTML UI has no latency-hiding features of any kind. If you are on a high-latency connection but you have some bandwidth available, you will have a much better experience with the full UI. Otherwise you face the full latency for every action.

The Inbox UI is for some reason irredeemable. It is slow under all conditions.

I just tried it. My GOD that's quick. I think I'll stick with the basic HTML version of Gmail.

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