Yeah I know

[altivo]

You get what you pay for. Gmail is free.

It has also become a bloated monstrosity. The featuritis is taking the whole thing over to the extent that I think they are losing touch with the original purpose of e-mail.

The real aggravation though, is the fact that whenever they have a slowdown or outage, as they did today for a couple of hours (early morning here, mid-morning to noonish in EU) the error messages always try to put the blame on the user, the user's computer, or the user's ISP. "Your internet connection is too slow" or "This is taking longer than expected." I love to hate that last one. Whenever they drop some unannounced enhancement into place, their server grinds to a near halt and they pretend it's my computer that's too slow...

Of course, for those of us who use e-mail heavily, as I do, changing to another address or provider is not a happy thought. I also dislike POP mail systems that download the mail onto whatever PC I'm using at the moment. I use too many machines in different locations, and my mail would end up fractured halfway across the county. I also like being able to read my incoming mail on my cell phone, which I can do with Gmail but not with any of the other web-based e-mail systems as far as I can tell.

I like the user interface mostly, though I wish they'd let me hide or remove some of the unneeded features, such as chat.

Unlike some of my friends, I only lost access for a half hour to an hour, during part of which I was commuting to work. It has continued to be erratic and sluggish though, for most of the day.

Comments

[ceralor.livejournal.com]

I actually thought the same, but looking at it from a coding standpoint, it's often the browser at fault, not Gmail itself. Gmail is written now as if it were a desktop app, with multiple processes occuring at once. The problem is, most browsers treat javascript in a horribly mangled linear fashion.

I installed Chrome on my system the other day for kicks, and actually started liking it, and I was confused at how fast it ran Gmail and other apps compared to, say, Opera or Firefox.

I actually found a 'comic', more like illustrated explanation, of how Chrome works. It splits up the tasks into separate threads, modernizing the browser instead of single-threading the entire browser or even tabs. So each tab is a separate process, not just each window. It's actually one of those "God, why didn't anyone else think of this before!?" concepts when I read over it. I think if I were a browser dev, I'd be facepalming at my own stupidity when reading it. Sure it uses extra resources initially, because it's modernized, but most computers anymore to be honest can handle it without a single problem.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Older browsers single thread. I don't think any of the tabbed browsers do that, not even (ugh) IE.

I'd expect Chrome to run Gmail. After all, they had an inside line on optimizing for their own systems. Unfortunately, no Chrome for Linux last time I checked.

Actually, my biggest gripe with Gmail is their error messages and their internal timers. Yes, I use dialup. Yes, it takes longer. I know that. I expect it to take longer. Their scripts are written to start complaining too soon, and to do it with very unuseful comments like "This is taking too long." According to government statistics, 40% of homes in the US still have no broadband options available, and 50% still have no broadband connection. Writing net software that automatically expects everyone to have cable modem or better is just stupid.