[nailer]

For me it's not about look but speed: Gmail simply can't put text in the compose box as fast as I can type it.

Gmail is the slowest web app I use.

From what I've read Google, for whatever reason, don't care about Gmail perf and use slow deprecated APIs in Firefox and Edge even when faster ones are available. The DOM looks like garbage with massive amounts of unnecessary elements.

It's basically the opposite pf everything every Chrome Developer Advocate says about web performance.

[Nicksil]

Don't get me started about the compose box (really any text box with their "rich text" implementation). It is terrible.

Like you said, the input alone has crazy latency. But the logic built into their formatting sends me through the roof most of the time.

Don't want bold text? Too bad, you're getting bold text because you enabled bold text one time about 10 minutes ago. Even though you disabled bold text, like, a second after you enabled it, you just now hit the enter key so you get bold text! And don't you even think about returning to non-formatted typing after you just pasted-in some text which may or may not have had formatting applied even though you did the very special kind of paste where plain, non-formatted text is supposed to be rendered!

Clearly, it has affected me.

[krrrh]

I switched to using the macOS mail app for the first time in years, and was kind of blown away by how fast it was. Native apps still have their place.

[jeffbax]

Yeah, to me Webmail is a backup not a default. Naturally Gmail is a bit nonstandard there too, but by and large functional.

[nailer]

Fastmail is web based and still way faster than gMail