[kevingadd]

When I'm trying to send an email, sure, I want the email client to get out of my way. But I also want to be certain that the email is going to the right person, and that the subject is correct (so they'll read it), etc. And those are all made harder by the new gmail ui.

The new gmail UI also uses less of my screen real estate (because it insists on being a tiny popup fake modal that I can't move) which means composing larger emails involves more scrolling. If I'm responding inline to quotes it involves EVEN MORE scrolling.

That modal is also glued to the bottom right of my screen, so if I had something there (like a floating window containing the email I was responding to), now I have to carefully resize my gmail window to get the modal into the right place - old fullscreen gmail had text start at the top left, so this wasn't a problem.

The new gmail compose mode also breaks the text caret in a way the old one didn't. I don't know if this is a gmail bug caused by using a custom edit control or a firefox bug or what, but it definitely tells me they didn't test it very thoroughly.

The new gmail is streamlined for particular purposes and not for others. You'd think that one of the biggest data companies in the universe would be able to gather actual data about how people use their software and ensure they aren't making it significantly worse to use for subsets of the customer base. Maybe this is what Google actually did, and they decided they don't care about the 1-10% of their users who use gmail for anything other than sending glorified SMS messages to people.