[Jtsummers]

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.

[mixedmath]

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.

[sundarurfriend]

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.

[brimble]

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.

[mattarm]

I suspect the answer is "a whole lot of us".

[chriswarbo]

My preference is using isync (IMAP) to a local folder, and interacting via mu4e (inside Emacs).

If I don't have terminal/SSH access, I'll use the "basic HTML" view.