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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

> But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful.

And we really have come full circle. Gmail performance, at least on Firefox, is awful.

Its performance is so horrible that even on a high spec machine with fast internet, you have plenty of time to click the "switch to plain ol html" button. Which is actually more in line with the performance I'd expect from a glorified file drawer.

I have plenty of time to hit "load basic HTML" on damn beefy machines running on Google Fiber (LOL).

Loads instantly for me on FF desktop and laptop running linux. But i have experienced what youre talking about.

You either have graphics hardware support disabled or youre laptop CPU is not running in perfoance mode and has its govenor set to something like balanced or power saving mode.

...why is a web-based email client depending on graphics hardware?

The same reason your desktop based email client probably depends on it. It’s 2020 and developers are starting to make use of all the modern browser features. It’s time to stop thinking like the browser is some fickle thing that needs to be caressed and treat it like a sandboxed OS environment for delivering apps and content.

We had rich desktop email clients - with more features than GMail - running on sub-GHz CPUs with integrated graphics. They also had better UI.

Obviously native code is faster than a generalized scripting language for the web. Again, it's all about what you're trying to achieve. You can still use those fast native clients, but you can also access your Gmail from any device that has a web browser, which is basically everything. If Gmail is slow today, then obviously Google has lost sight of that point.

I've never found a way around it. Hardware acceleration on/off, windows, linux, phone, workstation, ff, chrome/ium, it always loads like crap. And my daily drivers are a dual xeon workstation or an overclocked zen3 machine, pretty far from laptop constraints. Gmail just has no interest in being performant, I guess.

I don't have this issue with other sites, it's just Gmail being Gmail.

I don't think it's graphics support, but I have the same experience: The vast majority of the time, gmail in firefox loads in fraction of a second, too fast to click "basic HTML" view. And I'm not on something like fiber, just basic cable internet.

Whether or not this is true, when Gmail came out, it was WAY better (including faster) than everything that it competed with.

It was never faster then squirrelmail. It had cool features search was fast. But loading up your mailbox never as fast as other solutions.

I was considering things like Hotmail and Yahoo mail to be competitors. Free, ad supported, web based email. Was Squirrelmail that? I don't know I've hardly heard of it.

Squirrelmail is a GNU licensed webmail client. If you get a domain and hosting and they provide webmail for your domain, it's likely through Squirrelmail or one of a handful of competitors

It's of course perfectly fine using chrome, which may or may not be indicative of a serious problem for the open web

I was talking about the early Beta releases that caught on like fire. Specifically with their use of XHR. That doesn't mean that web apps are always slow and bloated.

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