Am a googler (hence throwaway account) & I can easily tell you why this shit keeps happening!

Google featureless ZERO penalties for fucking shit up! Zero! Do you know what the people who wasted two years on Allo got after it was canned? Nothing! Some of them actually got promoted!

Google GREATLY encourages "launches" - releasing something publicly. And keep in mind - no penalties if the shit is half baked, not working, only works on chrome, or some such nonsense! This is the norm!

Why? Promotion. You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you "launch" something big.

So what do you get when you add of all these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-three chat apps, and a never-ending chain of redesigns and relaunches so some people can get promoted.

Do you know how many bugs you need to fix to get promoted? Infinity. No matter how many you fix, it will never get you enough "impact" for promotion. Never.

How many useless redesigns do you need to launch to get promoted? ONE!

Extra fun: people internally usually warn about this shit, complain about it, file bugs about shitty performance, etc. It is ALL ignored. Most people who've been here for over a few years have given up filing bugs even. Because the reply is always the same: "you're not the target audience"!

And we all know it! We all do! Some quit when they realize it, others just begin optimizing for promotion as opposed to optimizing for what is good for the user or the company. And this is how you get new gmail, for example.

EDIT: replaced underscores with proper profanity as had been requested

A week or two after reverting back to the usable gmail, Google notified me they would switch my Google apps mail to the new gmail in a popup on the corner.

It presented me with two options: Now, Delay One Week.

Instead of choosing one, I adblocked the notification. Two weeks later I'm still on the old gmail that responds to clicks. Hoping it never changes.

Yes. I was complaining into the air on twitter, and their support responded by asking me to clear the cache and cookie.

I told them: no man, it's not cache and cookies. You're loading too much stuff on initialization. It takes about 45 seconds for page load, and it's not until 1m37s that I can compose an email. You're making about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. That's the size of a long pop song on iTunes!

I've now bookmarked the old "html gmail" just so I can compose emails in a jiffy. I think they assume I leave a browser tab open for email. Not when it's so heavy weight.

I hope it was the result of plenty of well-intentioned individual business decisions, such as Gmail now working offline in a first-class way, and relying on (presumably more complex and slower) web technologies to make that happen. I mean, the new Gmail is supporting a lot more features (including ones brought from Inbox), so a total architecture rewrite was probably necessary.

BUT -- at the same time it's super-sad, because Google (search) felt like it was one of the biggest forces pushing for faster page loads, publicly saying it would downrank sites that loaded slowly, and pushing things like SPDY -- and think of what Chrome did for JavaScript performance. And the old Gmail was so fast, so blazingly fast, loading instantly and keyboard shortcuts felt akin to using a terminal.

So the new, slow-as-molasses Gmail feels like the end of an era, a couple years after the same thing happened to Maps. Gmail is no longer about clever code that executes lightning fast in the browser, now it feels just like another piece of bloated enterprise software. :( They probably had the right business reasons to make Gmail more enterprise-friendly... but it still feels so sad as a programmer and as a user.

RIP fast Gmail.

It seems like almost everything Google related is sluggish. The new Google AdSense, the new Google Analytics, the new Google DoubleClick for Publishers, and to a lesser extent, the new Google Maps. These are all products I use that perform worse now (on modern hardware) compared to a decade ago. I really don't understand how this happens. Does no one at Google notice some of these services literally taking 10 seconds to load simple pages?

Welcome to 2018, friend, where we have several orders of magnitude more computing power and somehow everything is less responsive. It's all accomplished through an advanced process called "Software Engineering".

Not directly related, but I reckon the mentality of some web developers I've complained to about their "appsites" being sluggish is similar here --- "it works perfectly fine for me, how about you upgrade your hardware?"

I've heard that you can use http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ to get a basic HTML version.

It's incredibly slow and to top it all the new redesign is maddeningly bad. I have to zoom out to 90%-80% just to make it bearable. There is clearly no separation between various sections in the fifty shades of grey that's become their MO. This should never have passed the first line of review let alone be in production. With all their new decisions with the Pixel 3, Chrome and now Gmail, it's clear Google's list its edge.

On Firefox it’s unusable for quick work (open, quickly manage emails, close). The interface is noticeably slower than the classic UI. It’s maddening.

Not sure what I’m going to do when it switches over for our Google Apps account. Any alternatives people like?

I don't use Gmail, but Google Maps seems to be getting slower and slower all the time for me on some of my older boxes.

I imagine that it's just the classic case of developers having good machines, and the market share factor meaning they just don't really have to care.

I develop on a 12 core processor. If I make something user facing, I have to go out of my way to ensure that it's performant on other hardware; it's not part of the standard build/tweak loop.

Plenty of previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305366 — you’re not alone

I get drastically different performance using Google's services between Firefox and Chrome.

I had instant responses in Chrome for Gmail, Chat/Hangouts, Calendar, etc.

In Firefox? 4-6 second wait for _every_ interaction.

And I don't think the fault is with Firefox here...

I find it pretty sluggish. On Saturday I had to login to outlook for the first time in maybe 2/3 years. Wow the outlook ui from MS is awesome now. For me it was supe... ok ok ok. The login experience from MS still sucks donkey cock. I don’t know if they will ever fix that. But if you get past the terrible login experience. Man outlook is Super quick and clean. I switched back to gmail and i doesn’t look as good and it’s slow. Click things and wait.... gmail experience gone down hill.

Yes I have had equal experiences. It has directly lead me to begin switching to Fastmail on my own domain because I'm tired of this nonsense (along with their constant nagging to switch to the new version or chrome).

One setting I found that has made the new interface slightly more bearable is turning off "Hover actions" under the General tab. It gets rid of that awful box-shadow that makes scanning down the list difficult.

I can’t stand the new gmail to the point where I check my email only once a day. Every time I open that interface I get enraged. I am a UX designer and the new UI is a total clusterfuck - something you’d expect to fire someone over. Big G really messed this one up and I suspect many feel this way. If they have any sense left at all they’ll add the old view option back or revert completely.

Isn't that how modern web design works? Take away features, move stuff around randomly and make things slower?

Google has got really far away from their initial versions of GMail and Maps. They used to be lean and right on and now they are just a bloated mess.

I get pretty frustrated with it. I work almost exclusively with shortcuts, and after a while the interface decides to forget to respond to my commands.

Example - /,"is:unread to:me",Enter. Should search for unread mails to me.

On a regular basis if I move through five items rapidly and head into this search, it just shows a blank screen inside the area where the mails should be. Even hitting f5 won't resolve the issue at times. Ive actually stopped browsing through mails on some other threads because of this issue because it would take up too much time to keep debugging Gmail.

I just checked uMatrix how many scripts are running. After blocking hangouts, plus, play, notifications and whatever "ogs" stands for it got a bit snappier, and it still works.

Wouldn't it be crazy if email were built on protocols so users could choose their interface?

I was trying out GSuite last week and used the Google Admin console and had the exact same experience.

You click on options then you wait 2-5 seconds for the menu to load or the option to expand.

Coupled with the poor UX I'm surprised more people aren't complaining about the time they spend managing these systems, it's as bad as Office365 but it's damn close now.

I think what surprises a lot of people is that Google would take a premier product like Gmail and make it slower and less user-friendly.

Even when you try to use the "basic HTML", they decided to not provide a lot of simple features such as basic view customizations (e.g. standard, compact, relaxed). I'm guessing that was done to make sure people use the new UI - so it's use the slow UI or too bad for you.

Not sure much will change in terms of the new UI since people are more wedded to their email addresses than say their choice of search engine or maps.

When I worked with them back in the day, there was a certain "take it or leave it" attitude at times from some senior people about some decisions in products.

This was not all the people and I'm not speaking about the present leadership who I don't know, just that it was the case because back in the mid/late 2000s with my experiences and people I knew via working relationships.

Not only sluggish but I couldn't stand the custom font, it makes reading paragraphs of text a headache.

Set Gmail to default to basic HTML. You'll be happy you did.

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/make-gmail-display-mail-basi...

I use gmail over IMAP, performance on IMAP hasnt changed a bit.

I haven’t come across better mail UI than Inbox.

Inbox got demoted, new Gmail got promoted.

If what I was told is true, then at Google, data beats opinions, that is, they have data to back up those decisions.

Now, why am I not convinced this is the case over here?

It actually works great for me. Firefox Nightly on 2016 MacBook pro. Curious why experiences differ so much - I wonder if it's the difference between folks (like me) who leave the browser open always with Gmail in a pinned tab vs people who load Gmail only as needed. Although that can't be it entirely, because I restart Firefox roughly daily to apply nightly updates. Maybe some plugin interference? I run ublock but that's about it.

I genuinely hate the gmail interface - mobile especially. Completely unintuitive icons much of the time. Seems to do conversation threads poorly too.

Yup, noticeably much much slower than the old interface, while seemingly also not changing functionality or layout at all. What was the point?

Old version is available in the gear if you're using corporate gmail

Hell yes. I've been a gmail user for 15 years and I can't use gmail in my browser anymore.

For work, we migrated from Google apps to Fastmail.

But I still have 15 years of personal @gmail.com email and it's been my address forever. I currently use my phone for personal email (even when I don't want to) because the website no longer responds to input.

I prefer using email clients than using the Gmail on web because of this particular reason. Their web app is painfully slow.

Sent feedback during the test phase that it was unusable (hangs while "loading...") on slower connections and average laptops. Still forced it on us.

Killing G+. Google Search "mini games" annoying eyesore (Winter Olympic ones crashed browser so switched to DuckDuckGo) Censorship in China. 20k Googlers protesting. WTF?!!

I dislike Google's preference for making their experiences optimal on chrome. Gmail and youtube both seem to run faster on Chrome. It feels very monopolistic that their services run best with each other and poorly on the competition. It's probably not intentional, but very frustrating.

I've written about how bad it is, and I've given feedback, and I try to use Gmail basic whenever possible now. That's how bad it is.

But Gmail basic doesn't support changing sender's address... and attachments is a bit backwards, so I still have to stick with this monstrosity.

You're not alone. I was blaming on my internet connection for awhile, until I found this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095579

Moved to ProtonMail for important conversations.

I have mostly stopped using Google Gmail because they still can't do something simple like... I don't know... sort by sender? They keep changing the interface, but they never seem to improve the utility.

I use the content filter tabs (Social, Promotions, etc.).

Gmail refuses to let me move to a tab and mark new emails as read just about every time. It just hangs. I'll refresh and the same thing happens.

Multiple other issues as well.

Yes - I've since switched to the Apple email client.

The Gmail UI refresh is so bad that it's the final straw on the camel's back to get me to swap to something else. I was already considering it just due to privacy concerns, but I was sitting on that decision. The fact that it takes 30s for the page to load and another 30s to do something as simple as checking the box beside an email and deleting it made my choice for me.

What aggravated me most is that sometimes clicking on a button has no effect. First I swapped to the HTML only version of gmail but found it too limited. I have now been using Thunderbird for a week or two. It is not perfect, but it actually works quite well. Plus you can have a little calendar view for the day's events on the side.

If it's like the new google sites, they're clearly off loading everything possible to browser as JavaScript, making site slow, sluggish and unresponsive. - I guess that's just the norm for the future web sites. https://sites.google.com

My experience has been mixed. I do most of the work stuff on Chromium and the UI is okay-ish, used to be better, but whatever.

However, the personal stuff I keep it for Firefox, and it's just as OP said: 4-6 seconds to complete an action and even when the UI has loaded, not all icons are shown immediately.

I am on slow connection the entire week and it is a pain in the butt. I m sick and tired at looking at spinners and progressbars. It's not just gmail, everything google ( i suspect material designed) is sluggish. Try adsense if you want to ruin your day.

Yes sluggish, even on google fiber.

It's unusable. I have gone back to a mix of the basic html version and a desktop client.

Yes. I switched to using the "Basic HTML" version by default. Either turn JavaScript off and refresh the page once logged in, or click "Load basic html (for slow connections)" while the loading animation plays to get to it.

I'm finding it much quicker in just about every way than the old UI, using Firefox.

I keep 6 gmail tabs pinned and I don't find it sluggish at all on my 2016 MacBook Pro. The only thing that's slow for me is how long the non-default add-ons take to display after you load a message.

On top of the new gmail being extremely slow the new google Ads or AdWords is so much worse. I have to run an ec2 instance at work in order to get just “ok” speeds. This is with fiber optic internet...

Yep I posted something similar earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284264

The archiving delay kills me. I used to archive an email and close the window but not anymore. One would think it’s a single request to the back-end and the UI could be updated after that.

The only part of Gmail I need redesigned is the settings page. I thought, "surely, this page from before the last redesign will finally get the treatment it needs." I was wrong.

After the inbox debacle I decided I didn't want to use Gmail and am now a happy Mailspring user. If it could just implement Google inbox's sweep function, it would be perfect.

Yes! And the recent versions of Chrome on macOS are equally bad.

That's why I switched to the simple HTML version of the Gmail. Not as fancy, but it covers 90% of my needs. When I need fancy interface, I temporarily switch to it.

Yes I have definitely noticed the same sluggishness. Does anyone have any resources or recommendations for transitioning off of Gmail and onto another email provider?

The new gmail interface is just super busy and confusing and slow.

Spent my early morning disabling features just to curb info overload.

Google is turning into microsoft and microsoft into google.

Not really. I've been using it every day and not noticed the problems others have. I have a fairly old refurb PC. Notwithstanding the page loading time.

yesterday i was writing email with my new bluetooth keyboard and i realised that, words are appearing on screen after 5 seconds delay. first i blamed new keyboard and replaced batteries. then blamed chrome and checked memory/cpu usage all was fine. then i wrote email in vi and paste into gmail, even select old text and paste was extremely slow. thanks i saw this post, you are right it is almost unusable.

Yes, I have reported it to them and never heard back.

Noticed that too. Even with a powerful computer. The tags also take times to be automatically by associated to email you've just sent.

Ugh, i've been delaying switching from Inbox. Still holding out hope that someone at Google lets that thing live somehow...

Seriously considering going back to imap+MH.

Inbox does this now, as well. Half the time I open the page, I cannot even use it, despite seeing the emails loaded.

If you have something liké Adblock or UblockOrigin try to disable thème for Gmail, for me If had a speed boost.

.... it works perfectly fine for me

Yes. Me. It is slow. And sometimes mail doesn't appear. I have to refresh the page.

It probably uses Angular. :-0

All snark aside... You get what you pay for. I am slowly moving away from Google services. Paying in some cases reduces functions you might be used to, but also introduces freedom of ownership (well, maybe). But overall we are spoiled and I prefer using non mainstream services now.

I mostly hate the design and UX.

Also the fact that I can’t go back to the previous version.

"HTML (for slow connections)" applies to all equally! Finally, an egalitarian experience! And they said communism could never work.

How about that the back button takes you off site instead of back one email?

No, I don't use GMail.

Fastmail is great, though.