[kortilla]

Your mistake is assuming there is some correlation with usefulness and size.

The JS Gmail UI from 15 years ago was just as functional as the one today.

Websites that are supposed to be simple lists end up bloated and laggy because of really poor JS that makes one request per item iteratively to populate a list.

[markbao]

I do like the old JS Gmail UI. But the current JS Gmail UI doesn’t feel any slower. It is cluttered with more features, but some of them I find useful. (Displaying my calendar and being able to accept invites right in Gmail being a big one.)

[avhon1]

As someone who used the HTML gmail interface right up until google pulled the plug: the JS version is much slower to load. Every morning, I get to have about 10 seconds thinking about how it used to be faster.

[Narishma]

It absolutely is slower. To an extreme degree even. It takes 10 to 20 seconds to load and is incredibly sluggish to use on some low-end machines I use regularly.

[markbao]

I disagree that we should be optimizing for low end machines and holding back on product improvements for the 80% mass market. Technology improves, it’s one of its best traits. We don’t need to be stuck in the past.

[ndriscoll]

Low-end machines aren't necessarily stuck in the past. e.g. $150 minipcs that use 5W to give you a perfectly snappy desktop Linux experience.

[markbao]

I think those machines are super fun and a snappy Linux experience is very satisfying. I use a lightweight WM myself on Linux and prefer it over the heavy ones. But this segment is 0.1% of technology users and we shouldn’t constrain applications to the limited hardware that this population chooses to use.