[toomuchtodo]

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?

[1] https://jmap.io/

(fastmail user, no other affiliation)

[themodelplumber]

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.

[asddubs]

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.

[sundarurfriend]

> Still, if you change your URL manually after logging in

You can also bookmark the modified URL, or (what I do) have it always open as an "unloaded"/suspended tab that you can click to load.

[asddubs]

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

[andylynch]

Use a desktop app? Outlook and to a slightly lesser extent Apple mail are much evolved but still familiar in design to ten or even 20 years ago.

[mjrpes]

Also Thunderbird. Free and works on Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD.

[jeffbee]

Google launched IMAP for Gmail fifteen years ago. Use that if you want stasis.

[toomuchtodo]

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.

[dbbk]

I use a Mac email app called Mimestream that uses the Gmail API directly, it's a very nice experience.

[jeffbee]

Neither JMAP nor the Gmail API are ten years old so they don’t qualify based on the original complaint.

[toomuchtodo]

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.