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Comment by _akhe | Hacker News Reader

The splash screen shows for seconds on every page load in both Firefox and Chrome, and yes with/without extensions, and yes I tried unplugging it and plugging it back in :P

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.

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We apologize, we didn't intend it to sound that way. When logging into our web app, it's expected to experience a short delay because, unlike with Gmail, the web browser also needs to decrypt the data encrypted with zero-access encryption. So, the delay 1-2 seconds is expected. If more encryption keys are active on your account, it will take longer. This is unavoidable on an encrypted service. Depending on the browser, browser version, OS, OS version, and the device itself, the duration of this delay can vary further.

> the delay 1-2 seconds is expected

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.

Note that Gmail doesn't use zero-access encryption: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption. This is why Google has the technical ability to scan your email content, and Proton doesn't - on Proton Mail, you can only access your inbox with the account password, which only the account owner should have.

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.

> This is why Google has the technical ability to scan your email content, and Proton doesn't

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.

It's been confirmed in independent audits, and our code and cryptography are open-source, so they can be inspected (https://proton.me/community/open-source). It's also been confirmed in court, as we were never able to provide any of our users' email content to the law enforcement (when presented with legal data requests that we have no grounds to contest). Basically, we protect users' data by having no access to it.

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.

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