That doesn't sound right, have you reported the issue you're describing above to our support team at: https://proton.me/support/troubleshooting?product=mail?
If you navigate to the inbox - https://mail.proton.me/u/1/inbox - there's a splash screen with the Proton logo in the center and the text "Loading Proton Mail..." for several seconds on every single page load.
Try it out! Let me know.
It's been hilarious trying convey this to you guys. You designed it that way, it's not a user issue at all. If it helps sometimes it will say "Loading Proton Account..." for a couple seconds then "Loading Proton Mail..." for a couple more seconds.
I would say this is one reason not to use Proton - they treat you like this when you open a support ticket too, like it's impossible there's anything wrong and it's always user error. They're always confused as if nobody has ever reported it and you never arrive at a solution, you just get sick of talking with them after a while because they don't know their own product.
This user disagrees.
> Gmail is not encrypted
Don't know where you heard that but Gmail uses client-side encryption too: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?hl=en
They also use all the industry-standard encryption for requests. Proton may use different encryption techniques than Gmail, and because Proton doesn't run an ad business on my inbox like Google does, there are probably generally less crawlers in Proton messages than in Gmail, but wouldn't that make Proton faster?
I'm surprised the several seconds long splash screen doesn't get reported often - it's glaringly the only thing wrong with the service.
Email trackers, on the other hand, load upon the opening of a particular emails, not the entire inbox, so that shouldn't prolong the time it takes to load the web app, but only those emails that contain them.
I don't buy this theatre for 1 second. Proton obviously has the ability to run a data business off my data if they wanted to - they own it all and it runs on their server.
Not saying they do it, but the idea that it's impossible because of "encryption" is a joke - you assign the keys and you could easily use them on the backend out of my view, the user has no visibility into how that works or what you guys do behind the scenes - it's not like decentralized technology (even the best decentralized tech can't deliver on this promise yet).
So it seems like it's slow because of client-side encryption which Google also does. Yes I know they have a data business, but the data is still encrypted.
Your encryption keys are encrypted with your password (which we don't have access to), so we cannot access or use your keys. Therefore, the server doesn't in fact have access to your private encryption key. Once the files are encrypted with the user’s public encryption key they are no longer accessible to the server or the server’s owner: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption. For more resources on PGP encryption we recommend this one too: https://proton.me/blog/what-is-pgp-encryption.
I still use Proton, it's not a deal breaker, it's just a clunky and annoying software at times.