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by throwawayyyz 4644 days ago
I love Fastmail and have been a paid user for many years now, but I hate the new AJAXy interface, in particular the infinite scroll as currently implemented. Slow, annoying, and makes it difficult to reach old emails.
4 comments

Fastmail has one of the few interfaces that gets infinite scrolling /right/. The outer mailbox div has overflow-y: auto; and the inner div is the combined height of every message in that folder -- my inbox has 11381 messages, and the height is 364192px. When the scrollbar is moved, JS automatically determines which messages to load. Messages themselves are tiny AJAX requests that take less than 100ms each.

This is from the perspective of using Chrome on high end hardware, but I couldn't ask for a better web interface.

That said, they aren't joking about needing a new mobile interface: the current one is usable, but definitely lacks the same polish as the desktop version.

That infinite scrolling is AWESOME. I absolutely HATE everyone else's version that makes dragging the scrollbar useless as it jumps around.
I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.
I used to love gmail's webclient. When I moved to fastmail, I thought I'd miss that a lot. As it turns out, I started using thunderbird and K9 mail on my phone for reading e-mail and I never check my email from any browser at all. I feel now more comfortable with a dedicated email/calendar client - plus the enigmail extension - and it pushes me towards a good habit of never logging in into untrusted computers. I mean, I can't possibly be sure my own computer/cellphone are safe, let alone the other people's.
You can select the classic interface on the login page. I agree, it feels more usable than the fancy version.
Yeah, the new interface is missing a few essential things the classic interface has, so I keep the box checked too. Hope it doesn't get phased out- would be mad without the classic interface.