[antics]

Inevitably when you develop web technology at scale you end up asking the question of whether you should degrade the experience of the common case to make it ~comfortable for, e.g., netbooks.

Usually the answer, at least for a service like GMail, is to just ignore the netbooks. I actually think that's the right answer almost always, but I would absolutely love to hear the opposing view, as this is a position that I feel I don't fully understand.

[barake]

Looking at our traffic, the "common case" is fairly low resolution displays: 1280x800 (25%) 1024x768 (16%) 1366x768 (14%)

Luckily the new Gmail interface has three settings for display density.

[chadgeidel]

It's basically just a styling issue though. Couldn't they just provide a "netbook style"? Consider that tablets are about the same size and tablets are probably going to be the "common case". Unless of course they are providing a specific "tablet style".

Another poster indicated that the theme automatically resized based on window dimensions. I'm not seeing the new theme (merely the "Preview" theme in the list - there's a "Preview (Dense)" in the theme list as well).

[Slackwise]

> Couldn't they just provide a "netbook style"?

How did we lose sight of the fact that this is the entire purpose of stylesheets? To separate the display of information for various devices/platforms/needs. So yea, they should provide a "netbook style", and any other. That's really the point of it all.

> I'm not seeing the new theme

When it rolls out to your account, you'll see a little black notification bar/box in the bottom-right asking you if you want to try the new theme.

[FireBeyond]

"How did we lose sight of the fact that this is the entire purpose of stylesheets? To separate the display of information for various devices/platforms/needs. So yea, they should provide a "netbook style", and any other. That's really the point of it all."

Seems to me, "a couple of years ago". That's when any real innovation in CSS seemed to cease.*

* I can hear people arguing already. By "innovation in CSS", I don't mean "cool, awesome tricks" like "being able to render strange bullets in pure CSS by bastardizing four divs, a span, and a dozen lines of stylesheet", or "a bargraph library that outputs pure CSS".

Those are cool, awesome tricks, to be sure, hacks, but the very definition of "solving the wrong problem".

[jamesgeck0]

The theme does automatically resize. At the smallest size it's about as compact as the old theme. Another nice space saving measure is that you can minimize chat and widgets to little buttons in the bottom left.

You can also force the theme to use the smallest size via an option in the menu.

The new theme won't show up as a simple entry in the theme menu as it replaces all the old themes. Some have been remade or ported, but they're clearly running on the new theme engine. Alas, the Android theme no longer changes the Gmail UI font to Android Sans.

[SkyMarshal]

I don't know what the stats are, but netbooks (and tablets) are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think you can just default to ignoring them anymore.

I'm also glad to see the 'mobile first' idea gaining traction, with css/html5 frameworks coming out based on that. There are more and more use cases where a mobile site that gracefully expands to desktop size works out better than the inverse.

[k-mcgrady]

Netbook sales have stagnated and have been passed by tablets. They are expected to continue to decline.

As for tables, most users use dedicated apps so this design change won't affect them. Google usually does a custom web interface for tablets/mobile anyway to make it more touch friendly.