Gmail – A New Integrated Layout

How many of these have they killed already? Google Talk, Google Pie, Google Plus to an extent. Which ones am I missing?

I guess its good to know how to avoid getting pulled into yet another UI refresh that I do not want. Google's new chat system doesn't appeal to me even a little bit.

Inbox was the best email experience I've ever used.

They claimed that everything you like about Inbox has been integrated into Gmail, but it just isn't the same. All of your email categories/bundles were on the landing page. It was super intuitive to click into them and dig down into the hierarchy, and to go back/up a level on any screen you just scrolled to the top or bottom of a screen and overscroll (like a pull-to-refresh type move). I didn't have to pull out drawers or actively jump between categories. It was perfect.

Now with Gmail I have to click into my email categories one-by-one to see what's in each of them. It doesn't do the automatic bundling. And GOD the ads! Which there are not only way too many of, but they're constantly asking me if I find them useful or not. Of course I don't find them useful, I'm trying to check my email.

The decision to get rid of Inbox smells like a lot of office politics. Someone probably create Inbox as a fun new 20% project and then it took off with a massive customer base that was eating into Gmail's metrics and so they decided to kill it.

I think for people who take email seriously (e.g. have work or volunteering commitments) and don’t just use it as a receipt holder, the Inbox concept is horrifying.

Most of the good features are already baked into GMail and Outlook already. The extreme white space Material Design look is already way out of date.

The key feature of having AI monkey with the inbox is a non-starter if you might face consequences for the AI getting it wrong. Even something as basic as Focused Inbox in Outlook causes problems and it’s only got two categories. The base gmail experience is super bad at its own implementation of categorized mailbox.

It was so good! Once they got rid of it I started moving away from Gmail because it was clear they just didn’t know what they were doing.

I know! Inbox was by far the best productivity software I've ever used. I was an eng manager during the time it was available, which meant I basically lived in email. I feel like I was 2x as productive because of that one tool.

It was too beautiful for this world.

Inbox was a data-gathering nightmare for our 3-Letter spy orgs.

Inbox wasn't killed for lack of users.

Hangouts, Inbox, and most of Google's prior messaging platforms were terminated due to lack of centralized data-gathering of the most important data sets.

This is old news though.

I'm starting to see real problems with the continuous upgrade way of life. Giving people clearer and longer cycle of use seems healthier (especially for non tech savvy people).

Less random surprises, less regressions, less relearning, and when it needs to happen there's one clear hurdle to climb, if you want it.

One of many great reasons to care about open protocols and the ability to use third-party client applications. Software freedom (protocol freedom? interface freedom?) has _practical_ benefits for the public good. Attempts to deviate towards closed systems and protocols should generally be viewed as monopolistic antisocial rent-seeking by default, in my opinion.

I genuinely despise google. But this argument that people shouldn't need to learn things ever is what entrenches google, and Microsoft in our lives.

10 years...wow, 2012 front ends would involve gobs of code supporting so much ridiculous legacy IE junk, Safari junk, and so on...I can't imagine the nightmare of retaining web industry experts for such a thing. Plus a lot of the UX changes over the years were legitimately helpful to people, even power users.

This is part of the reason why the "user's choice of IMAP client" line is so great.

html gmail works. You used to be able to set it as your default view (well, you still can technically), but they stopped respecting that setting and just send you to the javascript one now anyway. Still, if you change your URL manually after logging in (and possibly answer a prompt of "do you really want to use html gmail?" with yes), you can still get to it, and it's the same interface as ever.

Use a desktop app? Outlook and to a slightly lesser extent Apple mail are much evolved but still familiar in design to ten or even 20 years ago.

Google launched IMAP for Gmail fifteen years ago. Use that if you want stasis.

I gave up pretty recently, within the last 5 years. My travel computer struggled to handle use of slack and gmail at the same time.

When I transitioned away from the gmail app, I also transitioned away from using gmail as my primary account. (Though this took a rather long time to completely migrate).

I used the gmail app on my phone over IMAP for much longer, but stopped that when some update made it so that I couldn't send plaintext emails from my phone anymore. All emails were html --- and I detest html email.

There is one exception. When I want to search old emails, I'll open up gmail and search. I don't have a good search setup for my old emails.

It wasn't as early as mid-to-late '00s, but it has definitely been a few years since I've used the Javascript version of Gmail. It used to be snappy and responsive back when it was introduced (when Gmail was the cool new thing), but in recent years it has been a resource hog to a level that its features cannot justify. HTML-only Gmail for quick update checks/read-only usage, local email clients for anything more complex I need to do.

I do for my personal email, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad there's no reason to pay much attention to it. I manually check it when I'm expecting something (99% of the time, from a computer).

I do use Basic HTML, though. The others barely add any features I care about and bloat the memory footprint by a large multiple. And their AJAXy loads take longer than full-page refreshes on Basic HTML gmail.

I suspect the answer is "a whole lot of us".

My preference is using isync (IMAP) to a local folder, and interacting via mu4e (inside Emacs).

If I don't have terminal/SSH access, I'll use the "basic HTML" view.

At least this one wasn't foisted upon us with no choice to revert. And since I'll never enable the Chat that this requires, it never will be.

If the major concern is the UI, not the Gmail server, using another email client (desktop email client) is an easier solution. There is a big gap between using another client and setting up a new email server altogether.

An alternative may be also paying another email provider, and probably setting up your own domain name for it, for easier migration eventually.

Did this exact thing 13 (wow! Time flies) years ago and never looked back!

You have to put in the hours but you know that you run that stuff!

Even after four major migrations (roughly one weekend every 3 years) and all the bullying from the big hosts to accept your mail I still wouldn’t change my mind!

Some changes are good. The new Facebook rewrite and redesign is good. The new Google Meet design is good.

This isn't.

Why not switch to a paid-for email provider?

Not only Google cares about locking you in their platform (they need your eyeballs) but they also intend to use your data against you (to influence your purchase decision and provide more pricing leverage to sellers).