I guess its good to know how to avoid getting pulled into yet another UI refresh that I do not want. Google's new chat system doesn't appeal to me even a little bit.
Inbox was the best email experience I've ever used.
They claimed that everything you like about Inbox has been integrated into Gmail, but it just isn't the same. All of your email categories/bundles were on the landing page. It was super intuitive to click into them and dig down into the hierarchy, and to go back/up a level on any screen you just scrolled to the top or bottom of a screen and overscroll (like a pull-to-refresh type move). I didn't have to pull out drawers or actively jump between categories. It was perfect.
Now with Gmail I have to click into my email categories one-by-one to see what's in each of them. It doesn't do the automatic bundling. And GOD the ads! Which there are not only way too many of, but they're constantly asking me if I find them useful or not. Of course I don't find them useful, I'm trying to check my email.
The decision to get rid of Inbox smells like a lot of office politics. Someone probably create Inbox as a fun new 20% project and then it took off with a massive customer base that was eating into Gmail's metrics and so they decided to kill it.
Literally the opposite is true. Inbox had a huge team (bigger than Gmail) and while it was loved a lot by some, it never gained much traction among the regular Gmail users, and it'd have been impossible to migrate the enormous Gmail customer base over.
I think for people who take email seriously (e.g. have work or volunteering commitments) and don’t just use it as a receipt holder, the Inbox concept is horrifying.
Most of the good features are already baked into GMail and Outlook already. The extreme white space Material Design look is already way out of date.
The key feature of having AI monkey with the inbox is a non-starter if you might face consequences for the AI getting it wrong. Even something as basic as Focused Inbox in Outlook causes problems and it’s only got two categories. The base gmail experience is super bad at its own implementation of categorized mailbox.
I know! Inbox was by far the best productivity software I've ever used. I was an eng manager during the time it was available, which meant I basically lived in email. I feel like I was 2x as productive because of that one tool.
Inbox was a data-gathering nightmare for our 3-Letter spy orgs.
Inbox wasn't killed for lack of users.
Hangouts, Inbox, and most of Google's prior messaging platforms were terminated due to lack of centralized data-gathering of the most important data sets.
I shudder at the amount of retraining non technically sophisticated users will need. The doctors, teachers, and everyday people who just want their e-mail to work so they can worry about their real jobs will all have some annoying cognitive load forced on them for reasons that benefit Google and not them.
I'm starting to see real problems with the continuous upgrade way of life. Giving people clearer and longer cycle of use seems healthier (especially for non tech savvy people).
Less random surprises, less regressions, less relearning, and when it needs to happen there's one clear hurdle to climb, if you want it.
A quick growth stage, typically when the subject is still new and being explored, and where a continuous or very regular upgrade is the best strategy.
For example, smartphones or computers were evolving so much still not that long ago, that keeping one for more than 3 years was rare, and costing a lot in term of usability.
And then, there's a cooling down phase, when the evolution is much slower, and gains are few and far between. In this context, a consolidation strategy is better, and if one keeps the previous strategy, you can end up with changes that feel forced and are not actually evolution, but just something pushed because one has to push new things constantly.
One of many great reasons to care about open protocols and the ability to use third-party client applications. Software freedom (protocol freedom? interface freedom?) has _practical_ benefits for the public good. Attempts to deviate towards closed systems and protocols should generally be viewed as monopolistic antisocial rent-seeking by default, in my opinion.
Is there any way to alleviate the problem of these forced UX transitions? At the time, Gmail was pretty revolutionary for what it offered (a large, free email account), but as the cost of compute and storage has declined, its pretty cheap to store 10GB-15GB of email in an mbox file or similar data store, fronted with JMAP [1], which any client or web front end that supports it could talk to. Is asking for long term support of a fronend (~10 years) unreasonable as long as the underlying API version is still supported?
10 years...wow, 2012 front ends would involve gobs of code supporting so much ridiculous legacy IE junk, Safari junk, and so on...I can't imagine the nightmare of retaining web industry experts for such a thing. Plus a lot of the UX changes over the years were legitimately helpful to people, even power users.
This is part of the reason why the "user's choice of IMAP client" line is so great.
html gmail works. You used to be able to set it as your default view (well, you still can technically), but they stopped respecting that setting and just send you to the javascript one now anyway. Still, if you change your URL manually after logging in (and possibly answer a prompt of "do you really want to use html gmail?" with yes), you can still get to it, and it's the same interface as ever.
yes, although if you have to login (which i do because my cookies clear on each browser reload), it will still redirect you to the javascript gmail after logging in, even if you came from the html-gmail URL. Really they just need to respect the html-as-default setting. I doubt they even broke it on purpose, it's just that nobody at google cares about it. And of course, trying to report any sort of issue to google is a lost cause. either it affects huge swaths of people and they find out about it themselves, or you're just fucked
No offense to Google, imap is inferior to both JAMP and Gmail's REST API for present day messaging and integration purposes. Google's IMAP implementation also has some...quirks.
It would be more accurate to compare JMAP to IMAP and SMTP, which have been around for forty years, and I think it's reasonable for me to calibrate forward looking expectations based on more recent protocols (such as JMAP). It would be wasteful to not consider increased utility from improved protocols currently in production for similar use cases.
Higher level, Google won't be around forever in its current form, so I think its reasonable to champion open standards and portability versus lock in to an org whose incentives between itself and its users is not that great. If you want to use a new Gmail version, great! If not, and Google doesn't offer ongoing support of a web version you're partial to, you can port out to another provider, just like a mobile phone provider.
How many (HN) Gmail users still use the Gmail interface? I remember giving up on it as a primary interface in the mid-to-late '00s, my laptop was crappy and the interface had slowed down so much that it was nearly unusable. There was visible lag while typing a message on my circa 2003 cheap HP laptop (I was a student, it was what I could afford). It was like getting sent back to 1996 and typing out documents in Word on a 486 (In 1996, I was only typing at 30 wpm and would easily get ahead of the system. Type up a paragraph, sit back and wait while it appeared on screen.)
I've only used it since when needing to type a long form email or grab some critical information from an email while traveling and borrowing a friend or family member's computer. I haven't even done that in years thanks to smartphones.
I gave up pretty recently, within the last 5 years. My travel computer struggled to handle use of slack and gmail at the same time.
When I transitioned away from the gmail app, I also transitioned away from using gmail as my primary account. (Though this took a rather long time to completely migrate).
I used the gmail app on my phone over IMAP for much longer, but stopped that when some update made it so that I couldn't send plaintext emails from my phone anymore. All emails were html --- and I detest html email.
There is one exception. When I want to search old emails, I'll open up gmail and search. I don't have a good search setup for my old emails.
It wasn't as early as mid-to-late '00s, but it has definitely been a few years since I've used the Javascript version of Gmail. It used to be snappy and responsive back when it was introduced (when Gmail was the cool new thing), but in recent years it has been a resource hog to a level that its features cannot justify. HTML-only Gmail for quick update checks/read-only usage, local email clients for anything more complex I need to do.
I do for my personal email, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad there's no reason to pay much attention to it. I manually check it when I'm expecting something (99% of the time, from a computer).
I do use Basic HTML, though. The others barely add any features I care about and bloat the memory footprint by a large multiple. And their AJAXy loads take longer than full-page refreshes on Basic HTML gmail.
I just wish they'd fix the performance. The bizarre thing is that it used to be fast while offering more or less the same functionality with more or less the same interface, and it's actually regressed. I'm not sure what on earth they have done, but they're doing something objectively wrong.
I ditched (all of) Google 2 weeks ago after 15+ years of having an account. I don't miss it. One of the last major annoyances before I escaped was the ever-decreasing amount of screen-real-estate that seemed to be available to actually use: this new eye-candy version seems to confirm that continuing trend, so I'm happy to be out of it.
So, what is the fundamental difference for me as a user between google chat's integration into gmail, and google talk's integration into gmail that they added back in 2006 and removed 7 years later? Both were chat features that allowed me to talk with my contacts.
It seems google has gone full circle and is building things they've already built and killed once before. I don't particularly mind, I'm just not going to rely on any of this stuff because in a few years they will kill it and replace it by something else.
-Under no circumstances do I want your update unless it's to circumvent a genuine security threat or addresses a genuine pain point that real users complain about on HN, Reddit or, if it exists, your user forums
They had right button panel and top right app menu button which shows panel of icons, I guess those are projects under different teams?, so new team starts adding panel on left side.
The design reflects team/org chart, just as you would expect in a big org.
It’s quite tiring how often they change this. Gmail is a horrible, cluttered, and slow UI. I have started migration to my own mail server with opensmtpd, dovecote, mutt and Rainloop for web mail.
If the major concern is the UI, not the Gmail server, using another email client (desktop email client) is an easier solution. There is a big gap between using another client and setting up a new email server altogether.
An alternative may be also paying another email provider, and probably setting up your own domain name for it, for easier migration eventually.
Did this exact thing 13 (wow! Time flies) years ago and never looked back!
You have to put in the hours but you know that you run that stuff!
Even after four major migrations (roughly one weekend every 3 years) and all the bullying from the big hosts to accept your mail I still wouldn’t change my mind!
Nobody cares about google chat, I have it set to auto respond with a message that says use slack. If people were looking for an excuse to move, this might be the catalyst. Training a non-technical workforce can cost millions, so maybe we switch to something else people don't need to be trained on. WTF is Google thinking...
Gmail used to offer major up changes as a option u had to enable/turn on. I wish they would go back to this. I’m now dreading the many calls/texts I’ll get today asking how to switch back to the old gmail.
(Side note- how is it that the leader in search, STILL does not support wildcard or partial word searching in gmail)
Not only Google cares about locking you in their platform (they need your eyeballs) but they also intend to use your data against you (to influence your purchase decision and provide more pricing leverage to sellers).
Sweet, now I can get the worthless Meet tab directly in the web version. Can't wait for it to only be GMail and Meet and have no other apps, because their enterprise offerings (with other worthless apps) cause changes to everything else.
My response to any Google announcement these days is "What's in it for Google?". I used to love Google when it was a scrappy startup with amazing tech, now I just assume they're trying new ways to shaft me.
"c'mon, use our messaging products again"