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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly though: the idea of loading 20MiB of JS to read a 24KiB message is weird.

What about downloading 70 MB of compressed binary code for Thunderbird?

> Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become.

I don't see how does it differ from traditional e-mail clients, except that you don't have to install, configure and allow unlimited access to your computer.

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> What about downloading 70 MB of compressed binary code for Thunderbird?

You do it only once, do not risk having to do it when being on a metered or spotty connection because your cache is not warm or the webmail got yet another update, which can happen at any time. You can apply Thunderbird updates when you are on a good connection.

You can access your mails offline, you don't re-download them each time you open them. It's faster, even on a good connection.

> configure

The configuration part for most providers is essentially typing one's email address and password, so there is not much to say.

> allow unlimited access to your computer

That is why I am reluctant to run non-free software, but Thunderbird is free, I can reasonably trust it. Especially the version packaged by my OS vendor. I agree a better isolation for native desktop apps may be desirable though.

You can also firejail programs on Linux and so forth.

> You do it only once

I just checked and my second gmail login downloaded 500 KB before it became usable. Browser allows for caching of downloaded code.

> do not risk having to do it when being on a metered or spotty connection because your cache is not warm or the webmail got yet another update, which can happen at any time. You can apply Thunderbird updates when you are on a good connection.

I agree with your point. I think that it's possible to implement a separate update for web apps with explicit request, but it's rarely done and unusual for web.

> You can access your mails offline, you don't re-download them each time you open them. It's faster, even on a good connection.

Web browser allows for local storage and offline work which could be utilized for those features. You can enable offline mode in Gmail. I just checked, it works.

> I just checked and my second gmail login downloaded 500 KB before it became usable

Sure, but tomorrow? This afternoon?

500 KB is 1-2 seconds on the connection I'm currently using (not at home right know). It's 4-5 seconds on the train to get there… in the sections were connectivity is available. 500 KB is huge. That's 1% of my previous monthly mobile data plan.

I think we should revisit our idea of what amount of data is fine to do anything on the web today. Data transfer is not free, it needs infrastructure and electricity.

500 KB should be the amount of data to download for getting the full web application with cold caches, tops. Can you imagine the number of instructions you can fit in 500 KB of code, especially high level? I can't.

> Web browser allows for local storage and offline work which could be utilized for those features. You can enable offline mode in Gmail. I just checked, it works.

I guess, but I don't trust this. And as a web developer, I am well aware that local storage is limited in size and there is no way my gigabytes of mails are going to fit.

There is a basic HTML version of Gmail for slower connection speeds or folks wanting to use less data.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/151823/how-to-se...

500 KB is huge. That's so true.

Compare to the mutt package, a fully features mail client, weighting in at ~1.8 MiB — without the need for an additional gigantic runtime.

I'm not saying mutt is an alternative to GMail for most people. But just to give some feeling for the size relations here.

Is it true that you only need to download Thunderbird once? Don't you need to download new versions? Security updates?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

re-read my comment

On one side, you download 70MB of thunderbird once and update it every once in a while without losing access to your emails while it's updating. On the other side, you have to download 25 MB of Gmail more frequently because cache is invalidated at a higher rate than thunderbird updates and you have to wait for your browser to download most of the page before you gain access to your emails.

Don't get me wrong, I use webmail all the time with protonmail, Gmail, outlook and purelymail, because it abstracts installation and updates, but your argument doesn't seem to be valid.

It's not just that the cache is invalidated, I also suspect Google changes the JS code fairly frequently enough that the browser needs to download a fresh copy (even if the cache it has is not that old and could otherwise have been reused). Compiled apps on the other hand are much more static.

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment states that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes

>Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features. Zawinski himself has stated:

https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1331287160738070528

>My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.

So it follows that most programs that can read email are enormous ("expand" being the operative term, with Emacs and Thunderbird being the archetypal examples)!

> I don't see how does it differ from traditional e-mail clients, except that you don't have to install, configure and allow unlimited access to your computer.

Most people are using Google's client in some form (Chromium), so they do pretty much have unlimited access to your computer, unless you use Firefox or Safari. Most people are logged into the browser itself, so it's even worse. With Thunderbird you aren't linking every single thing you do online to your email account.

I personally would prefer a one time 70 MB thunderbird download rather than a recurrent 20MiB download every time it loads.

I value my time more than I value my data, I guess.

It obviously doesn't transfer 20MB of anything. With a hot cache it needs about 300KB of traffic to load the initial thread list.

Browsers caches that kind of assets. So in practice you only only download it once every time it gets updated

Unless you only use web applications in private browser windows and/or clean your browser data every time you close the browser and/or have cache disabled (though this one's more by accident, since Firefox gives you the checkbox under network tab, but it doesn't work for just the site that you're developing locally, but seems to persist globally for all of the browser).

Of course, that's not the use case of most people, but that's also one that shouldn't be dismissed entirely - for people who don't trust the modern web in any capacity, local system software is indeed a better choice.

Which is likely more than once a day given today's web-development practices (continuous integration and such).

To be fair you only have to download the 70 MB once (+ the occasional updates). Gmail instead pushes its JS over and over again. Every time I load Gmail it feels like it's starting from Square One all over again but even actually using it (opening, replying, etc) feels slow. Thankfully one of my several $WORK email accounts is 365 based so I just redirect my two other $WORK_RELATED Gmail accounts there. Big productivity boost that way since I get instant access to my emails without having to wait for the JS to load over the network.

It differs very greatly from traditional desktop mailers in that the search on gmail is fast (because it brings thousands of machines to bear on your request for an instant) and the search in desktop apps takes forever (because your little computer no matter how beefy does not have a million cores).

Have you actually tried search on Thunderbird?

The quick filter finds messages in seconds in a folder with > 10000 mails. Not instantaneous, but not forever.

The global search is instantaneous because Thunderbird indexes the mails.

Not having to rely on the Internet to find your stuff is a feature, not a bug.

But then my search is not powered by the cloud!

Snark aside, I sometimes feel like we reinvent the wheel using new technologies just because we like the new hotness.

I see the OS battles take place and my only thought is..at work, I want an OS that: Boots and then gets the hell out of my way so I can do my work. I don't want it to try and sell me things or re-arrange things or have to spend time tinkering or fixing it.

Now in my free time, sure! I set up a computer with pass thorough GPU so I can game in Windows while running Linux. It was fun and a learning experience.

The reason search is slow on your computer is just that the app doesn't use the right kind of index, or maybe no index, for whatever reason. I can index hundreds of gigabytes of text on my laptop and have full text search take a couple milliseconds.

The problem is mail servers. They usually don't support search this way, so the client has to download or cache each message to do the search. Gmail gets around this by having their own protocol and the indexes ready.

IMAP does support server-side full-text search of bodies. (In mutt, this is invoked with the =b operator of the l command.) Amusingly enough, this works well with real mail servers like dovecot, but it seems to sometimes miss matches with gmail, because gmail's indexes aren't very good.

The more you know, thanks!

In apple mail, I can search all my mailboxes for all my accounts in one search and it's pretty much instantaneous. Most of my email accounts are hosted in gmail, but I generally use Apple Mail to access them (the only times I go into the web interface is for the account I use for submitting writing where I apply multiple tags to each message indicating publication/piece submitted/response type or to clean out the spam folder since I worry a little that if I delete messages from Apple Mail I might be inadvertently telling gmail that the spam wasn't actually spam).

I have a few GB of mail folders. I can search them more or less instantaneous, using Kontact (KMail).

Full-text indexing isn't dark magic at all.

I guess we have different requirements of scale. My gmail is over 300GB (one of the reasons I have a Google 1 subscription).

Ever considered to archive parts of it? I have difficulties to believe all of that is currently needed mail. (I know, it piles up over the years! :-))

Also most of it will be likely some bloat form HTML mail and attachments (especially with their inefficient encodings).

My point was: Handling full-text search indices over even dozens of GB of plain text isn't anything a mediocre computer couldn't handle nowadays.

Thunderbird downloads once.

(Or at least, once per upstream update.)

If you stick with mutt, the binary is < 1 kB.

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