Yes, it does take longer to load (which they try to hide with an extra animation) and it now seems it’s not completely loaded when the screen appears (as it can take a while to load the first message if I click it right away.)
However, I keep Gmail always open in a tab, so I don’t really feel it. Once it is fully loaded, it seems to work just as quickly as before.
No, I don’t know why they would make Gmail slower or bulkier. Google is pushing faster load times everywhere else, and even their search punishes sites that take too long to load. They don’t follow their own guidelines that things should be available quickly.
It should just load a raw HTML page (albeit with the theme) and load in the other parts as it goes. Extra features should be compartmentalized and allow people to turn them off. But it seems the feature heads are in charge, not the people who optimize.
Oh, and I would never go back to a separate client. Not worth it to have separate online and offline folders. And I know of no other client that lets me just show the emails I haven’t opened on top.
I do use the Gmail app on moblie, though, since it does let me do that stuff.
They have sexy-fingered some other stuff (for example, routing), but at the moment basic view still works. But they do hide that now. It used to be you could select basic view from standard view. Now the only way I know to set basic view is to search for ‘basic view’ and follow the link from the help page.
Welp; I’ve been using Gmail for almost a decade now, and I’m pleased with it. The only complaint I have is that files over 25MB in size need to be sent via Google Drive. Royal PITA, when you consider all the steps involved (such as manually setting the Privacy settings on that file to ‘anyone with the link may view’ for those neanderthals who don’t Google). This means I have to wait for up to an hour to get a file through. Damn.
I’ve started getting emails for addresses that are similar to mine. For example: my email would be a.b.cdef@gmail.com and I’m getting emails for abcdef@gmail.com. When I try to send them an email, it comes to my inbox.
Exactly right. They’ve always had this feature. I used to use it with two different accounts on one site that required a unique email address for each account, as Gmail considers username@gmail.com and user.name@gmail.com to be the same address. Then I learned that Gmail would ignore text after a plus sign and I was able to switch to username+firstaccount@gmail.com and username+secondaccount@gmail.com, which was more intuitive for me as a user.
I haven’t noticed problems with Gmail but as mentioned by another poster above, I almost exclusively check it via the Android app.
I haven’t seen any bugs in GMail functionality in a very long time. I use it extensively on 2-3 Windows computers, 1 tablet and 1 phone. I get perfect sync between all of these, including tagging and archiving (which I’m a great fan of), and the spam filter is excellent. And I laugh at my hubby when he tells me that he can’t get his (POP-based, ISP-hosted) mail on his (Android!!) phone because he forgot to close Thunderbird at the office.
However, when they overhauled the Web-based GUI a few months ago with all those sliding menus and buttons, it did become more memory-hungry. Right now, according to Chrome’s built-in task manager, my GMail tab is using up 405 megabytes. Oh, wait, it’s been 5 minutes: 408 megabytes now, and I haven’t touched that page in the interim. It’s ridiculous, of course, and the enhanced GUI doesn’t enhance anything for me. I might switch to HTML view while it’s still available.
Speculation: Those for whom GMail takes a long time to open may have some limitation on their Internet connection. There’s a limit on the size of packets that the connection, router, etc. can handle easily, and GMail may be sending packets that are larger than this, so it needs lots of retries (jabbering).
(Again, this is just speculation, I’m not qualified to verify any of it.)
I use Google Fiber, and my Gmail animation load is slow. One would hope that they would have configured for their own service (even if it is a bit of an orphan these days).