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Comment by piyush_soni | Hacker News Reader

Just FWIW, I love the new Gmail compose as well. It is indeed useful to be able to go through and consult previous emails without doing the back and forth for writing one mail. And I really love Gmail for all the small convenience things they keep on doing, like including a 'Track Package' button in the 'product shipping' email's subject itself ! As far as I know, they were the first to do many innovative things, like drag and drop to attach files! They shouldn't stop trying new things.

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Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusable. It breaks a number of things for me that I actually use in my work on a daily basis.

Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):

1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.

2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?

3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.

4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.

I like it too. I can write multiple emails at once, and a chat box will never be in the way of the composer. Maybe there should be a "snap back into page" button thing, but people seem to forget that there is a pop out button if you want a more mono-tasking email style.

Additionally, with this interface, it could be more integrated with hangouts and cross google's services (maybe easier send email pop up on andriod tablets?).

I think that's a fundamental difference in working style. I never write multiple emails at once, nor have I wanted to. To me that is clutter.

The "pop out" choice is a poor one since it turns Compose into 3 operations: Press compose, press the pop-out button, press maximize on the new window.

(as for the chat box, I use Minimalist, and my Gmail UI is trimmed of anything extraneous).

Just hit "d" -- first have shortcuts enabled.

Yes, I found that out in this thread. It's still a worse experience, though, as it's much slower.

the in-page-pop-up composer is just a lame substitute for people that don't know how to click "Compose" with the middle button (or pressing the modifier key of choice). Well, you don't even have to know that, just open a new tab and type gmail<Ctrl+Enter> and you can reference your other emails while writing.

the problem with google launch for that feature is that they DID NOT give the choice.

So, people that is not slow and know how to use tabs effectively, got their writing space crippled. and it became a pain to actually see the email i wanted under the in-page-popup composer. because you know, some people have 10inch screens.

at least now they made it available to go back to the old format. ...that will give me a few more months to look to a gmail alternative.

it also gives me the ability to have more than one compose window open side by side.

As far as I know, they were the first to do many innovative things, like drag and drop to attach files!

The interesting truth is that Zenter was the first. I know because they demoed it to me in 2007 shortly before Google acquired them.

Well, if Google acquired them that makes it half (okay, much less than half half) right.

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