Please Google, let us revert to the classic Gmail look | Hacker News Reader

Please Google, let us revert to the classic Gmail look

productforums.google.com

288 pointsfiric181 comments

Same thing happened with Google maps a couple of years ago. They changed the UI to one a lot less functional, gave users an option to use the old UI for a while, then took it away. Now we're stuck with gmaps that are much worse than they used to be.

Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.

The layout takes up more of the screen, which I kinda like, but my issue was always how terrible terribly slow it is now. It's so laggy, compared to competitors like Here and OSM. The Fruit co could probably give Google a run if they opened up a web version.

Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.

New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.

It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.

> The Fruit co could probably give Google a run if they opened up a web version.

This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)

Apple already released a JS SDK for Maps: https://developer.apple.com/maps/mapkitjs/

There's actually an official JS Framework for Apple Maps [1]. It's not a dedicated website, but still

https://developer.apple.com/maps/mapkitjs/

It's the 3d globe view that is slowing maps down on my old hardware.

OSM fortunately doesnt have this problem, nor does Mapscii.

For your phone try OSMand if you haven't already, you can find it on FDroid

Does anyone know a good web based OpenStreetMap renderer? And a service that hosts tiles for it? I just wanted to make something like Google Maps Navigation but web based. Google Maps doesn’t really let you rotate the maps by heading, and more. We did some hacks but I would like more control!

MapBox? It’s been a few years since I’ve used it but I guess it’d fit your needs: https://www.mapbox.com/maps/

Is it web based though? I am looking only for web based renderers!

I've found this to be true of every piece of Google software. The only app by Google I still have on my phone is Gmail, and that's because I haven't updated it in a really long time. Everything else I've replaced with some alternative.

I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.

What alternatives for Google products do you use for browser and for maps?

Google is just incredibly unreliable. The one Google app which I've really taken to over the past few years is Inbox, so of course it's being discontinued.

I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.

What functionality did the old google maps have that the current one doesn't?

For one it was fast and didn't make my laptop have a stroke

It had maps. No, seriously, you open up maps to use the maps and you can't because the map barely takes up any screen estate.

On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!

On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.

They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.

Once you move the map most of the bloat is hidden for me.

Regardless I agree with your sentiment. I'm betting we'll come full circle at some point - or else they'll lose their maps users to some equivelant of duckduckgo.

It had features that appealed to early adopters and not just advertisers and lowest common denominator users on futuristic hardware

45 degree satellite view.

> Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.

Sad but true. Redesign is also a great way for managers to increase their budgets.

"If it ain't broke, redesign it."

After switching back to Firefox quantum 4 months ago I find the Google Maps web UI slows down to an unusable experience. Since then, I have been using the Bing Maps web UI. Who would have thought there is a day MS product is triumphant over a Google one. A new life cycle has just begun I am aware.

>Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.

But they should get demoted for making good products bad.

OK, hang on, i'm with you that the initial redesign had less features, and was slower, but people forget that Google Maps used to have 2 buttons - Maps and Satelite view. Then they added Terrain

Then they added a little Street View guy

By making a pullout hamburger menu on the side, they were able to add: * Traffic * Google earth/globe integration * Notifications * Location Sharing * Your maps (used to be an entirely different site) * Your contributions * Your timelines * Multiple sharing options * Transit - including schedule exploring * Bicycle - including topographical elevation changes

And that's before you get to languages, tours, tips and tricks, settings, history, and ability to provide missing data.

Oh and every location, with contact information, photos, and menus.

You don't have to like the design aesthetic, and you can complain that all these features made the product unusably slow, but the re-design was NECESSARY to add the new features.

The UI is horrible and it has already been discussed in many places, but to me the slowness is the no.1 problem. I thought it was just a hiccup when they had it on optional mode, but now it's plain slow. I've tried on different connections and different browsers and they all seem to generate the same result. Super slow loading times of the interface and the emails. I still remember when gmail was the fastest kid on the block or when they've optimized chrome for a faster gmail. But now I'm really looking into alternatives. Last week I've switched from chrome to firefox because of the synced login thing, and gmail will be a bit more complex to change instantly but I'll surely find a way.

Man, last week a friend asked me to set him up with an email account through Dreamhost shared hosting. My first reaction was "who does this anymore" but after 10 minutes passed (he already had a website there) I was sending him IMAP server information and thinking, "I have got to move on something like this, I'll bet it's 200% faster than current GMail." It's not going to be a GSuite-level toolset for him, of course, but wow, simple email like that is a huge portion of my personal use case.

I've done the same. IMAP is great and in the worst case many registrars use round cube for webmail, which is quite decent.

Isn’t spam the main problem nowadays? I find a hosted mail unusable without some spamfilter in front that is either costly or comes with your corporate accounts.

I don't think so. I was using a selfhosted email for years and never had any problems with spam. You just need to configure your email services to use some DNS block lists like those: zen.spamhaus.org bl.spamcop.net and so on. Also, setup DMARC and SPF entries for your domain. https://dmarc.org/

I have been using self hosted email for two years, spam, I have received < 5 spam emails targeted to my personal email address. Last spammy email was in February. Those mails were impersonating a read friend of mine and real people we both knew or they knew were in CC.

I did receive:

- several spam emails by week until May on another domain I host (at info@<domain> and contact@<domain>, easy to filter out)

- one spam last month at info@<mypersonaldomain>, also easy to filter out.

All of these spammy emails came from OVH IPs.

It's interesting to see that I haven't received any spam to personalized email addresses I give to stuff that need an email for registration so far.

edit: actually, I just received a spammy email at info@<domain>. So weird. Not from OVH this time.

I've been on a shared-host IMAP server for 20 years. I use my own domains and Tbird or another IMAP client. The host has excellent spam filtering (spam assassin & procmail) and doesn't spy on me. I even use gmail (but rarely) through an IMAP client. That way I never have to see their web UI.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> and doesn't spy on me

How do you know this ?

Do you mind giving the name of the shared hosting?

For your use, may I suggest cheaper and better options from the privacy angle? Here are some email providers that check both these boxes:

Posteo.de

Mailfence

Runbox

Mailbox.org

It could be a hardware thing though, that your GPU can't make use of hardware acceleration.

It's hilarious and sad that we should need GPU hardware acceleration for email.

That is a ridiculous requirement for an email webapp.

When an email client needs hw acceleration, they are doing it wrong.

I challenge you to name a single mail client which doesn't use graphics hardware acceleration in some form.

Even an old fashioned DOS computers console display modes are graphics acceleration - that's why it doesn't have to draw the fonts pixel by pixel - the graphics hardware gets them out of a ROM in real-time.

If the UI is your only concern, why not try one of the hundreds of native email clients available for whatever operating system you may be running? I haven’t used Google’s web interface in years.

If you've got a reasonably fast connection and machine, the "load basic HTML (for slow connections)" link at bottom right disappears almost instantly when loading the Gmail web interface.

You can use this direct link to the basic HTML version:

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/

but Google's not quite done with you yet, presenting this message along with two buttons:

Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?

You’re about to use a version of Gmail designed for slower connections and legacy browsers. To get all of Gmail’s features, including inbox categories, images, and quick actions, please use the latest version of Gmail (recommended).

Take me to latest Gmail | I'd like to use HTML Gmail

Selecting the latter button allows you to enjoy an interface from a simpler time.

Also, HTML version works even with JS disabled.

Speaking personally (I happen to work at Google, but not on mail):

The combinatorics of supporting multiple versions of a product get expensive very quickly. It's the same reason that web platform changes now affect evergreen browsers directly (even with the occasional breaking change), rather than introducing more modes like quirks and strict.

Every variant you introduce grows the surface area for bugs and security issues, and adds at least one more case to consider when implementing new functionality. Even if you froze the featureset in the old UI, you'd still need to maintain compatibility with it as the backend evolves. It's not as simple as just leaving the old codebase running on a server somewhere.

If Google wanted to invest in multiple mail products, it wouldn't have end-of-lifed Inbox.

I mean... if it takes 23 seconds to load on my machine, and the old version took less than 3, maybe its not worth maintaining the new version to begin with. Just a thought.

If it takes 23 seconds to load you definitely have an issue and not new Gmail.

I disagree, if it took 3 seconds to load and now it takes 23, given mostly the same features, it means the software is broken, not the hardware it runs on.

I think the point is moreso that 23 seconds is abnormal, not the experience of most users, and therefore likely either not consistent for you (maybe your WiFi connection dropped) or due to some wierd configuration on your end.

(Technically speaking, I work on Gmail, but unrelated to this)

Mine takes 21 seconds to fully load, including the tasks and calendar sidebar from a fresh browser start with no caches and cookies, but only timing from clicking the sign in button.

I think that's misleading. I tested a few times this morning, and had clean-cache "load" times of 10-35 seconds, but I could use the app within 5 and chrome devtools showed ready in under 10.

So I'm curious what your metric is. Is it until the last resource is fully rendered in devtools, until the ready action fires, or until you can actually do things?

My metric was until the loading bar finished on the little fancy but useless opening letter animation which also probably took a significant time to load.

Do you hear yourself? You said to him:

> 23 seconds is abnormal, not the experience of most users, and therefore likely either not consistent for you (maybe your WiFi connection dropped) or due to some wierd configuration on your end.

And then you said:

> I tested a few times this morning, and had clean-cache "load" times of 10-35 seconds

And the middle of that range is 22.5 seconds. And you accuse him (a commenter on HN) of being so inexperienced that he can't distinguish between a new UI's very slow load times and his WiFi disconnecting?

> (Technically speaking, I work on Gmail, but unrelated to this)

Is everyone on the Gmail team like this? If so, no wonder we're having these problems. Google just won't listen.

The first thing I noticed about the new UI, and the thing I notice every time I load it, is that it takes 5-10 times as long to load as the former UI. It's just yet another reason to migrate off of Gmail for me.

If you read the rest of the comment, you'd see that the relevant load time was <5 seconds, and that the longer load time was misleading. I was checking to see if the way they were measuring was useful or not. They clarified, and for some reason what was taking 3-5 seconds for me across multiple machines takes them 5x that. In other words, I was asking what his benchmark was, because it's easy to stumble into a misleading one, even for an experienced user.

I mentioned wifi dropping because that's exactly the reason it took 35 seconds to load. Every other time was sub 15.

Please follow the guidelines and respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what I'm saying, which is on fact trying to understand the issue, not in fact blaming someone. There's no reason to be rude or accusatory.

> Please follow the guidelines and respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what I'm saying, which is on fact trying to understand the issue, not in fact blaming someone. There's no reason to be rude or accusatory.

It would be good if you would do the same. Your comments to him seem to not follow those guidelines.

I think Inbox was an interesting approach to "fixing Gmail", which I've long had un-cite-able suspicions of internally being horribly broken (in the sense of maintainability and elegant architecture, not visible bugs).

Amongst only 11 outages in 14 years of continuous operation and use by probably a billion people, in 2011 Gmail lost 0.02% of users' email due to "a storage bug" that nuked all copies of data, and they had to restore from tape: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-eve...

This status quo and example, along with the fact that https://google.com/appsstatus lists Gmail at the top, is a clear demonstration that Gmail is probably locked down so tight _everything_ has to be demonstrably proven to be at near-aviation-grade reliability before it's rolled out. I wonder if the Gmail team retains the same people from 5-10 years ago to minimize the amount of onboarding churn and maximize the chances things will be broken from unfamiliarity.

The Inbox idea was pretty inspired: _start again_, make a separate property/"brand", keep it reasonably niche, and you can get away with an effectively-lower SLA. And then once you get past the teething problems and speedbumps you can pivot the functionality back into Gmail.

But yeah, doing the pivot/fold-in does nuke the identity that got created. That makes power users who liked it more sad. And obviously you can't tell everyone the project is temporary or it won't go viral.

These systemic issues are not at all unique to Google, of course.

Interesting. I switched to the new Gmail, and I actually can't remember what the old one looked like already. I'm sure Google will do just fine ignoring all these requests and their billion+ users will adapt.

I got in a bad car accident. Neck back hurt. I can't remember what it felt like before. Not sure I'm better off now.

You are not.. the car manufacturer is better off , since you can't remember it is their flault..

The comment was meant to be analogous to remembering an incident and tracing a time where my prrception was positive.

Was not meant to show tracing producer/consumer value/fault.

but you can still feel neck back hurt

I agree, that thread is a bit dramatic. With compact view, I'm failing to see a big difference.

The biggest problem in my opinion is not the new looks, but the degraded performance.

It seems after just opening GMail the website tries to cache every listed email in your inbox. After that is done, it becomes faster. My use case is not to leave GMail open in a tab all the time, so I have to suffer through this caching period every time GMail is opened now.

This, together with the recent Google-China upheaval, is the final straw for me. I've had a GMail account since the beginning, and am now looking into alternatives (ProtonMail, self-hosting).

My biggest issue (that users will find hard to ignore) is the lag. The new UI loads noticeably slower... And I don't feel like it's giving me anything useful to compensate for the lag.

Seen this type of comment thread before countless times on the Google support forum. They'll placate the complainers by saying they're listening to feedback and then only pay heed to the positive comments and not change a thing. De rigeur for businesses. The general type of dishonesty is quite amazing. Yes, people are maybe excessively resistant to change, but when everyone is telling you something sucks, your customers, who do you listen to, them or your marketing department, oh wait, don't answer that.

It's de rigeur for bad businesses. Especially considering many gsuite users are paying customers.

Replying to self: judging from the voting here people on HN have a poor view of business. I'll point out Stripe or most smaller tech companies as an example of listening to customer feedback and doing something about it.

The folks at Google aren't idiots. They now that there is a vocal minority of complainers, most of whom will accept the new UI after a week or two. For a customer base the size of GMail, placating every complaint is just not in the interest of their business.

That is one of the downsides of dominant marker players. Microsoft had the same leverage with Windows 10 (this round of complaints feels similar, although the focus is different).

People who don't like it should use IMAP/SMTP (until GMail shuts that down), or vote with their wallet and go somewhere else. The world could do with more competition for email.

Agreed, but what do Google get out of making the new version?

The biggest negative business impact for them is that the new version makes talented developers less likely to want to work there. When Gmail first came out, it was breath of fresh air. It showed how to do email right. I remember wishing that I worked a company that could create such brilliant software.

By the way, to use IMAP/SMTP you will need to switch "enable unsecure apps" in Google Account preferences. Google considers all auth methods except OAuth2 to be insecure (and OAuth2 doesn't work in my slightly outdated version of Thunderbird). But I think the opposite: with OAuth2 the token is stored on your device, with password auth the password is not stored anywhere.

That stored token is the same as a long lived session cookie, providing the same level of security.

"Everyone"? What do you base everyone on? The same set of complainers on HN in comments?

It just force-updated for me. I had clicked the "wait two weeks" (or however many weeks) prompts, delaying the inevitable, but had thought I would at least still be able to click the "revert" button as soon as the change occurred. There was no button this time.

So I clicked through to the "simple HTML" version as soon as the link presented itself at the bottom of the fancy new splash screen and have been a little less unhappy ever since.

Now I just need to quit talking about it and finally finish my move out of Google's house. Everything else is out except for the email. The damn email.

Yup, the 5s+ delay difference with the new version was the exact kick in the butt I needed to finish my migration to fastmail.

The Gmail plugin for thunderbird works well. For me that's the first step away. Next step is arange a imap account somewhere.

Everyone hates UI changes. Wait 6 months and it will be the new normal.

Seriously, every time big company does large UX change, there is a post like this asking how to revert.

Sources:

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020032...

Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8w03ms/is_it_poss...

Old reddit is still available and still better.

New reddit is insanely slow. Just touch your mouse and it fires off 30 network requests.

New reddit looks like a fake spam site and is completely unreadable at a glance.

I think this response often comes up in response to complaints about UI changes. Sometimes it’s a valid response, and people are just being resistant to change. Sometimes the changes are genuinely bad. The point is - the fact that people complain about everything doesn’t mean that some of the things they complain about aren’t legitimate problems!

Legitimate or not, what the user perceives as problematic may make total sense for the business providing the service. Google (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) is not a non-profit or government agency that acts in the interests of the people. It's a business operating on capitalist principles, so profit is, by design, their main drive (of the business as such, not necessarily of the individuals who work there).

Somehow we insist on treating these mega-corporations as if they are always beneficent, and anytime one of them does something that doesn't align the user's and business interests, there is a storm of complaints like this.

Sure, it would be nice if a mega-corporation always acted in its user's interests, but that's not how the current system works.

Ideally, we'd end up with a system where you just pay a company to host your on-line end-points, keeping all data and the software you use personal, and you have the option to move to a competitor at a moment's notice, keeping all identifiers (like an email address now). Where just not there yet.

Not sure anyone can enjoy new Reddit design. Tried using it for 2 weeks a couple of times, every time I go back to old.reddit is like homecoming.

It will be the normal, but this has been a disaster. The fact that I get a loading indicator in an email is ridiculously annoying.

Why can't it continue loading in the background after it shows the first screen?

There's been a loading indicator in gmail since at least the first whitespace-y redesign (2011? 2012?)

Now we have a loading indicator and an animated image for the user to watch the progress as they need that.

I may be over generalizing but this is so true. The same People will yearn for the existing UI when you Google updates it six months down the line.

> I may be over generalizing but this is so true.

may be the existing UI works fine, and having invested the effort in using it only to be forced to abandon it once again.

Imagine if a car manufacturer keeps changing the wheel and the pedals around.

You have a good point, which is that cars have a horrible UI. One of the most important requirements is the ability to brake fast in an emergency, yet the UI requires you to physically move your foot to another pedal before you can even start to brake.

Why don't they change the UI, then? Mostly because of regulations, I think. It's unclear to me whether bringing a new driving UI to the market would be horribly difficult, costly and risky, or just plain impossible.

While you and a million others might not like the new $webapp UI, it's still a good thing that they can and do get changed. Especially in this case considering you can start using any email client anytime if you don't like the web UI.

Considering Gmail takes seconds to load now (250Mbit link, Ryzen 8core, 32 GB RAM), I don't see myself using Gmail if they upgrade in the same fashion in 6 months.

Some changes are just bad and will inevitably need to be fixed. e.g. Windows Vista & (IMHO) New Reddit

Yes, the moving ratchet of web bloat. It will be a new normal, true. It will still be shit.

Indeed. And it's not only websites, either.

Consider all the people who still use sysvinit and (a fork of) GNOME 2. (Yes, I think many who oppose systemd do so because of the UI change.) And consider the much larger group that initially opposed that were strong opponents for a while but have now moved on.

At least systemd made things objectively faster!

It took over 20 seconds for the compose Window to pop up today.

Yes it was the first time on load, but why did Gmail take 30 seconds to load before it was usable? Why did a website take as long to load as my entire OS? 32GB of RAM, 4+4 cores, what the hell is going on?

I just tested again, 34 seconds from hitting enter at "gmail.com" to getting a compose window loaded.

Gmail used to be lightening fast, an example of what an amazing HTML5 webapp could be. Now it is a joke.

Just tried it myself and it took 10 seconds. That still seems far too long.

Unless you're Digg

I don’t understand why gmail ties their functionality to skins so much in gmail. This is the third time they’ve forced a UI change for no functional reason, just that they wanted easier maintenance.

I really got bugged in 2011 when they got rid of their terminal theme [0].

I don’t think this is a UI issue, I think it’s just poor design where a skin would somehow not perform well. It seems pretty easy to maintain different simple skins or to provide an API.

[0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...

This is one of those things where I'm baffled by how strongly people feel about the re-design. In fact it doesn't even feel like a 're-design' to me since the layout is more or less identical to the previous version. I've had zero issues with using the updated look and I actually enjoy that it looks more modern now. If you don't like it, why not just switch to an actual email client and forget about the web interface?

The issue that I (and countless others) have is that the new interface is agonizingly slow to use.

I could give a hoot about the redesign, but the fact that it now regularly takes 5-10 seconds to switch to my “sent” or “drafts” folders— an action which happened practically instantly in 2008– is unacceptable and has prompted me to begin migrating to another email service.

I know I could use Thunderbird— which I used to— but I’ve come to rely on the web app for access away from my own computers. I’m preliminarily quite happy with Fastmail.

It's funny, I absolutely love Inbox, but that's going away in favor of the "improved" Gmail which supposedly incorporated many things from Inbox - but I can't stand the new Gmail either.

Ditto. I finally bit the bullet this week and made the switch from Inbox back to Gmail since Inbox is headed to the guillotine.

So far I’m finding it awful. Miss my bundling and I miss swiping to snooze on iOS (swiping both directions archives in iOS though I’ve heard it’s configurable in Android)

Scrolling the list of emails is very choppy on Safari, and works on Chrome and Firefox. How annoying. We're entering a new browser monoculture where something only has to work on Chrome :/

I think it's a good time to test out a few self-hosted email clients, perhaps storing emails on a mail server that retrieves incoming mail from gmail, and sends out via gmail as well to avoid the authentication/blacklisting/spam filtering hassles.

RainLoop looks pretty good for a web client. Any suggestions on clients or mail servers (only to fetch mail from gmail or outlook)?

on firefox, it doesn't open the message, when i click on it after search. i had to revert back to html.

My biggest problem with the new UI is the font. Roboto, or whatever font they are using, is terrible to read a lot of small text. I wish the font could be set to Helvetica or disable web fonts for Gmail.

ublock/umatrix can disable web fonts for a domain.

With the old UI I don’t have to scroll down to see the labels that I frequently go to. The new UI uses a heavier font that the labels list takes up more vertical space than they used to which is becoming a nag for me.

Not sure how many people have noticed, but there are 3 Gmail UIs that I've been seeing in the past few weeks. One is the entirely-new UI, one is the classic UI, and one is a subtly-modified version of the classic UI. It's hard to distinguish between the last two, but one way to tell is if you see "Sent" instead of the usual "Sent Mail". For some reason I seem to be switched back-and-forth between the two occasionally. I'm confused why they even improved that UI though, since it seems they want to shift everyone to the new UI.

And of course I hate the new UI. The information density is low and the graphics are (e.g. the Important and Star markers) visibly blurry under non-96 DPI.

I don't mind the UI so much, besides the speed. My issue is that sometimes it just doesn't work. I click on an email to open it and nothing happens, even if I wait a while. I end up having to reload the page. It's somewhat frustrating.

I'm a big fun of the latest GMail and of the modern Google Map. I think, their changes are usually based on thorough UX research. It is normal, there are a strong minority, who cannot get used to new user interfaces and cannot accept changes... Luckily there are alternative services, so they can use something else. ;)

They are better UX-wise yes but they are also much slower, that's my problem with it. I don't really care to have fancy animations if it takes 5 more seconds to load and 3 more seconds when I click on something. The new Google Maps is bad enough that I use only the phone app now.

Do you have specific examples? Everything is instantaneous for me.

Just loading the empty Google maps page (just https://maps.google.com) takes at least 5 seconds for me. During that time, it's doing so much stuff in the background that it makes the input on the left lag, so during that time, you realistically cannot do much, otherwise you risk to mistype your search.

Every Zoom/Unzoom animation is lagging a lot, the problem is they added that everywhere to make it fancier:

- When you click on a result

- when you click on the arrows on the destination screen

- when you enter a destination

- when you click on another type of transport (car, public transport...)

So all those actions are lagging because of that.

It's probably because they only spent time to optimise it in Chrome but I don't care, I prefer to stop to use GMaps than to use Chrome.

Might just be you. It loads in under a second for me.

On which browser? On my case if I open Chrome it loads under a second as well, but I'm using Firefox unfortunately.

You're living in a bubble full of fast, pervasive network connectivity, faster computers, and tech savvy, intelligent people.

The world is filled with people with slower connections, slower computers, and people who access their email in a different environment than Chrome on windows. Nearly all of them not a strong minority are adverse to change.

The latest google mail interface which they are on their way to killing so called "inbox" is slower not because it is so feature-full but because its poorly written. On a computer that is reasonably modern click on an email and wait 7 seconds is in a word crap. Inbox is only really designed to run well on chrome and switching browsers to run a single site is like changing religions because you like the other sides hats better.

You know what's comparatively amazing. Viewing email in emacs via mu4e and being able to access information in your mail even when you aren't connected to the internet and reading searching and composing as fast as your fingers and eyeballs work rather than waiting for a slow web only resource.

Via xwidgets it can even render pretty html if you need to.

https://imgur.com/a/crz3IoM

Design is for people.

The symbolic language they've added was the last straw for me. Gmail is the last Google product I'm using and I'm now working on getting away from it. I really can't tell what each button does now without a label, and I've lost a few mails due to it.

I prefer email clients to web-mail. I have multiple email addresses so I use email clients to manage my accounts; contacts, calendar, meeting schedule lookups, view multiple mail accounts, reply from multiple mail accounts, less passwords to remember etc.

Even though I'm using something else, Eudora still rocks by the way. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-eudora-email-client...

I don’t consider there to be anything technically interesting here, neither with regard to design. Flag and move on.

As others have mentioned: a vocal minority always dislike UI changes, but in six months it will be the new normal.

One thing I will say though, it’s starting to look like we’ve run out of good UI changes and what we’re served up now is the refried beans / day old reheated leftovers of UI design.

Anyway, the elephant in the room is: move away from Gmail / free email services. Email, for me, is way too important to have no paid support.

>> Email, for me, is way too important to have no paid support

Paid support (and other features) is $1.99/mo.

https://one.google.com/about

Oh! I didn't realise that, wow! Well, that's interesting. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Not available in my country.

Also, paid support is just one piece of the puzzle. More important is to not be locked in.

So buy your own domain and if you really want Gmail then pay for G Suite.

From the guidelines: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please Google, let us keep Inbox

That's what we get for still using gmail in 2018. I'm migrating to paid email next month.

For me it's not about look but speed: Gmail simply can't put text in the compose box as fast as I can type it.

Gmail is the slowest web app I use.

From what I've read Google, for whatever reason, don't care about Gmail perf and use slow deprecated APIs in Firefox and Edge even when faster ones are available. The DOM looks like garbage with massive amounts of unnecessary elements.

It's basically the opposite pf everything every Chrome Developer Advocate says about web performance.

I switched to using the macOS mail app for the first time in years, and was kind of blown away by how fast it was. Native apps still have their place.

Yeah, to me Webmail is a backup not a default. Naturally Gmail is a bit nonstandard there too, but by and large functional.

Fastmail is web based and still way faster than gMail

Don't get me started about the compose box (really any text box with their "rich text" implementation). It is terrible.

Like you said, the input alone has crazy latency. But the logic built into their formatting sends me through the roof most of the time.

Don't want bold text? Too bad, you're getting bold text because you enabled bold text one time about 10 minutes ago. Even though you disabled bold text, like, a second after you enabled it, you just now hit the enter key so you get bold text! And don't you even think about returning to non-formatted typing after you just pasted-in some text which may or may not have had formatting applied even though you did the very special kind of paste where plain, non-formatted text is supposed to be rendered!

Clearly, it has affected me.

I still have the option to use old gmail thankfully.

They did the same thing to YouTube, however there is a nice Chrome extension to force the old version.

The main gmail.com now forces me to use the horrible new design. However, I manage a for-pay Google apps domain (@sagemath.com) for my company, and it still lets me use the classic look. Does anybody know if I will also be forced to switch to the new horrible design for my for-pay Google apps domain? The new Gmail design actually gives me a pretty intense sense of motion sickness -- I feel I have a genuine accessibility issue with it and really hate it, and will have to consider migrating off of gmail if they don't provide their classic UI.

- It's slow

- It's ugly

- It's a bad UX

I am so disappointed that this one is the first complaint about a software I'm writing after Windows ME. So, a "welcome" to GMail ME. Please, Google correct it or give us back the previous version.

I can't stand the new gmail. It's ridiculously slow and doesn't do anything new. The trick I've been using to get around having to use the new interface is using the mobile interface instead. Here's the link:

https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp

You might have to log out completely. It works consistently when I open it in a private window on Firefox 62. Also you'll probably get a prompt to install the mobile app, just click the "not interested" link at the bottom of the page. Your mileage may vary.

I call it Death by Redesign - https://www.alexkras.com/death-by-redesign/

People who switch mail providers: maybe use your own domain with the new provider, so you don't have to change your email address next time.

In 2012 I switched back to running my own e-mail. I realize there are reliability issues sending stuff out to Google/Microsoft (and yes, I have the correct DKIM, SPF and DMARC records), but I'm still happier running my own.

I use Thunderbird and Roundcube, but I could also use Evolution if I wanted to or Microsoft Mail on my Windows machine or even fire up Squirlmail in a docker container.

Overcomplicated for an average user. Doesn't apply to 99.99% of the population unfortunately.

Good thing he posted it to hackernews then, which is full of people to whom it CAN apply.

Frankly, neither do the complaints about the new UI voiced here.

You don't think anyone uses browsers other than Chrome or wants to access mail faster than 7 seconds to load contents?

I think these people exist, and that their complaints are valid. I also think that the percentage of people who complain about it is not significant enough for Google to perceive this as more than a minor public relations issue.

1‰ of GMail's users complaining effectively means that a lot of people are miffed, but it may well be that this is totally acceptable and expected as far as Google is concerned.

The majority of average users now access their email via their phones. Desktop access to email should focus on the people that actually use it.

The mail part might be fine, but they completely broke the editing functionality of the task list. No more merging/splitting items.

The app has become unbearable slow with no tangible benefit to me as an end user. I would revert to simple gmail in a heartbeat.

It's so sloooooooooow

I’m using the standard HTML mode. The new scheme is just awful and too confusing.

If this makes even one user switch away from gmail, that'll be a win in my book. I hope Google continues treating their users and products like garbage, until none are left.

Let people have Inbox and old Gmail. Why do we as users need to live through every time when Google decides to change for the sake of change?

Why not use a desktop/mobile mail client of your choice to access gmail over open protocols? Then they can clown up the web UI all they want and it won't matter to you.

If you are using multiple machines, your desktop client will be a huge headache to set up each. Business computers at work have outlook, but personally, I cannot use the client(s) for my 6+ separate computers. Browser email is the way to go.

Mmm I’m sure you accept that’s an extreme minority requirement.

Anyway, what’s painful about setting up multiple clients?

Gigabytes of data per account. Sync issues. If you are asking, you probably never suffered from these.

> a huge headache to set up

OK, but "huge headache" is somewhat exaggerated. For many clients, gmail connection settings are a preset option, where you enter a username and application password. It's a one-time configuration.

> outlook

My condolences.

> my 6+ separate computers

You are perhaps an outlier? But I can see how it's a hassle in your particular case.

Outlook type of software download all of the emails. Which means gigabytes per account. I use multiple google emails (gsuite), and this makes things harder.

Copying a settings folder is a "huge headache"? It takes s lot less time than writing a complaint post on HN.

Even if you have 6+ computers.

Am I blind or what? I have not noticed a single change to my account, not at least in the last 2 weeks. Is there a screenshot of said changes I can check?

Here's a side by side comparison https://i.imgur.com/Nm7LahL.png

Oh, right. I guess I did notice the change but sort of seamlessly just moved on. Aside from the sidebar(s), I still honestly don't notice any significant difference.

“Everything is round”

The only way to settle this one, is to wait for one of the following groups of people to go extinct:

- those who like round things - those who like rectangles

The main thing for me is that the themes have not been updated for 7 years, and they only work by applying a background image now.

While at is please KEEP Inbox. I went back to Gmail now that Inbox is being discontinued and its like going back to stone age.

I don’t mind it. What are the biggest issues?

Load speed. It adds ~5sec per action in the interface.

One response I have is that it was vaguely perfect approx 6 years ago. And it's just clinkier feeling in terms of responsiveness and visual apace efficiently . . And probably a better point is to say: I might be wrong at the analysis level/efficiency numbers. . But if my brain is stressed out from the change enough that I'm laying here on a Saturday ranting and getting worked up on this apparently along with others here, prioritising this over normal leisure & conversing /entertaining out of town guests... There may be some unnamed metric here that isn't measured and represents a negative impact on users?

I ended up reverting to basic html mode. It took some time to get used to, but everything is miles faster.

Ive been debating a full move to protonmail. Or is fastmail the big current alternative?

I just switched to Outlook.com and basic HTML mode for when I HAVE to use my old email.

I want them to not kill Inbox!

you can still use the pure html interface which is perfectly functional and extremely fast

yes please

The average user doesn't even know what SSL is, yet we are discussing round boxes in Gmail and 2+ second delay. Literally, no one cares, google knows this too.

Yet another meaningless google discussion.

Gmail's user base = billions of people.

A few hundred upset users can be misleading.

Or, representative.

This only means many users are upset.

But even if they were 100,000, that would be a small fraction of the user base and you could still say the user base is either indifferent or satisfied with the change.

>But even if they were 100,000

That would still be representative. A sample. I don't understand your argument.

A sample but a self-selected, louder sample. I would bet the overwhelming majority of users are indifferent to the change.

Simply put, normies count. Not us. Even if 1% (few million users?) are upset now, this wouldn't make google change their mind serving 99% unaware users.

I don't understand. We (at least the folks who are unhappy with this update) are the users of the application. The complaints pertain to issues which affect both "normies" and "us" alike. If I observe an unresponsive/lagging behavior, it isn't because I may be more technically inclined, but because my brain detected an unexpected delay between my input and the outcome.

This is how we get crap everywhere.

“It’s fine, only people who know what they’re talking about eilll realise how slow it is” is a terrible view to have when developing a piece of software!

I was so used to the old design, it was more functional to me

Idk but I always hate on the new redesign until I get used to it. The only exception being reddit - still using the old reddit design

The thing is that someone saying "I don't like the new UI" doesn't say anything. Always when you change something that more than 10 people use at least one person will be unhappy with a change.

What they hopefully do is check the metrics, e.g. of how many people switch to desktop mail clients and basic html view.

And honestly the new UI doesn't disrupt my workflow that much. You can like or not like the roundedness or that it got slower, but the workflow can stay almost the same. Therefore I'd say the current change is at least better then when they switched to teh Google-plus-everything mode a few years ago and fucked up all processes and all static links.

So the most elite software organization in the world could have made it even shittier, but they didn't.

They probably consulted the Abuser's Handbook to find that you have to boil the frog slowly.

Clearly they did check the metrics for users switching to the old gmail interface, because they removed the option to revert.

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