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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

I use a netbook for my gmail. This new UI is, once again, a big negative from me because of all the wasted "white space".

I hate this love affair we have at the moment with white space. To me, it's wasted space. I guess I just hate scrolling or maybe I should just move to Asia.

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At 0:17 in the video, they resize the browser window to netbook dimensions, and all the whitespace automatically disappears.

That's so much nicer. I need to trick it into doing that all the time.

Oh. Just found the "Display Density" options.

Took me ten minutes to realize that there are now 2 gear icons on the page. Was continually clicking the one in the "global header", but there is second one on the page where the Display Density options are located. How's that for bad UI design?

There is an option for 'display density' in the top right which is very neat. Compresses everything to fit way more emails per page.

I use a normal 15inch laptop and that wasted white space was an issue for me. Hopefully with the new theme, the 'compact' theme is compact enough.

We know that you use Gmail from a variety of screen sizes and devices, so now the spacing between elements on the screen will automatically change based on the kind of display you’re using.

Looks like it will re-size elements automatically based on screensize.

Inevitably when you develop web technology at scale you end up asking the question of whether you should degrade the experience of the common case to make it ~comfortable for, e.g., netbooks.

Usually the answer, at least for a service like GMail, is to just ignore the netbooks. I actually think that's the right answer almost always, but I would absolutely love to hear the opposing view, as this is a position that I feel I don't fully understand.

It's basically just a styling issue though. Couldn't they just provide a "netbook style"? Consider that tablets are about the same size and tablets are probably going to be the "common case". Unless of course they are providing a specific "tablet style".

Another poster indicated that the theme automatically resized based on window dimensions. I'm not seeing the new theme (merely the "Preview" theme in the list - there's a "Preview (Dense)" in the theme list as well).

> Couldn't they just provide a "netbook style"?

How did we lose sight of the fact that this is the entire purpose of stylesheets? To separate the display of information for various devices/platforms/needs. So yea, they should provide a "netbook style", and any other. That's really the point of it all.

> I'm not seeing the new theme

When it rolls out to your account, you'll see a little black notification bar/box in the bottom-right asking you if you want to try the new theme.

"How did we lose sight of the fact that this is the entire purpose of stylesheets? To separate the display of information for various devices/platforms/needs. So yea, they should provide a "netbook style", and any other. That's really the point of it all."

Seems to me, "a couple of years ago". That's when any real innovation in CSS seemed to cease.*

* I can hear people arguing already. By "innovation in CSS", I don't mean "cool, awesome tricks" like "being able to render strange bullets in pure CSS by bastardizing four divs, a span, and a dozen lines of stylesheet", or "a bargraph library that outputs pure CSS".

Those are cool, awesome tricks, to be sure, hacks, but the very definition of "solving the wrong problem".

The theme does automatically resize. At the smallest size it's about as compact as the old theme. Another nice space saving measure is that you can minimize chat and widgets to little buttons in the bottom left.

You can also force the theme to use the smallest size via an option in the menu.

The new theme won't show up as a simple entry in the theme menu as it replaces all the old themes. Some have been remade or ported, but they're clearly running on the new theme engine. Alas, the Android theme no longer changes the Gmail UI font to Android Sans.

I don't know what the stats are, but netbooks (and tablets) are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think you can just default to ignoring them anymore.

I'm also glad to see the 'mobile first' idea gaining traction, with css/html5 frameworks coming out based on that. There are more and more use cases where a mobile site that gracefully expands to desktop size works out better than the inverse.

Netbook sales have stagnated and have been passed by tablets. They are expected to continue to decline.

As for tables, most users use dedicated apps so this design change won't affect them. Google usually does a custom web interface for tablets/mobile anyway to make it more touch friendly.

Looking at our traffic, the "common case" is fairly low resolution displays: 1280x800 (25%) 1024x768 (16%) 1366x768 (14%)

Luckily the new Gmail interface has three settings for display density.

I had similar problems on my small screen with Google Voice. I found a Greasemonkey script which solves most of them. Once Google starts forcing me to use the new Gmail interface, I'll probably make something similar for Gmail.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/114048

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