Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.
Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.
New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.
It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.
I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.
I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.
OSM fortunately doesnt have this problem, nor does Mapscii.
For your phone try OSMand if you haven't already, you can find it on FDroid
This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)
Then they added a little Street View guy
By making a pullout hamburger menu on the side, they were able to add: * Traffic * Google earth/globe integration * Notifications * Location Sharing * Your maps (used to be an entirely different site) * Your contributions * Your timelines * Multiple sharing options * Transit - including schedule exploring * Bicycle - including topographical elevation changes
And that's before you get to languages, tours, tips and tricks, settings, history, and ability to provide missing data.
Oh and every location, with contact information, photos, and menus.
You don't have to like the design aesthetic, and you can complain that all these features made the product unusably slow, but the re-design was NECESSARY to add the new features.
Sad but true. Redesign is also a great way for managers to increase their budgets.
"If it ain't broke, redesign it."
On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!
On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.
They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.
But they should get demoted for making good products bad.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Posteo.de
Mailfence
Runbox
Mailbox.org
You can use this direct link to the basic HTML version:
http://mail.google.com/mail/h/
but Google's not quite done with you yet, presenting this message along with two buttons:
Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?
You’re about to use a version of Gmail designed for slower connections and legacy browsers. To get all of Gmail’s features, including inbox categories, images, and quick actions, please use the latest version of Gmail (recommended).
Take me to latest Gmail | I'd like to use HTML Gmail
Selecting the latter button allows you to enjoy an interface from a simpler time.
The combinatorics of supporting multiple versions of a product get expensive very quickly. It's the same reason that web platform changes now affect evergreen browsers directly (even with the occasional breaking change), rather than introducing more modes like quirks and strict.
Every variant you introduce grows the surface area for bugs and security issues, and adds at least one more case to consider when implementing new functionality. Even if you froze the featureset in the old UI, you'd still need to maintain compatibility with it as the backend evolves. It's not as simple as just leaving the old codebase running on a server somewhere.
If Google wanted to invest in multiple mail products, it wouldn't have end-of-lifed Inbox.
Amongst only 11 outages in 14 years of continuous operation and use by probably a billion people, in 2011 Gmail lost 0.02% of users' email due to "a storage bug" that nuked all copies of data, and they had to restore from tape: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-eve...
This status quo and example, along with the fact that https://google.com/appsstatus lists Gmail at the top, is a clear demonstration that Gmail is probably locked down so tight _everything_ has to be demonstrably proven to be at near-aviation-grade reliability before it's rolled out. I wonder if the Gmail team retains the same people from 5-10 years ago to minimize the amount of onboarding churn and maximize the chances things will be broken from unfamiliarity.
The Inbox idea was pretty inspired: _start again_, make a separate property/"brand", keep it reasonably niche, and you can get away with an effectively-lower SLA. And then once you get past the teething problems and speedbumps you can pivot the functionality back into Gmail.
But yeah, doing the pivot/fold-in does nuke the identity that got created. That makes power users who liked it more sad. And obviously you can't tell everyone the project is temporary or it won't go viral.
These systemic issues are not at all unique to Google, of course.
It seems after just opening GMail the website tries to cache every listed email in your inbox. After that is done, it becomes faster. My use case is not to leave GMail open in a tab all the time, so I have to suffer through this caching period every time GMail is opened now.
This, together with the recent Google-China upheaval, is the final straw for me. I've had a GMail account since the beginning, and am now looking into alternatives (ProtonMail, self-hosting).
That is one of the downsides of dominant marker players. Microsoft had the same leverage with Windows 10 (this round of complaints feels similar, although the focus is different).
People who don't like it should use IMAP/SMTP (until GMail shuts that down), or vote with their wallet and go somewhere else. The world could do with more competition for email.
The biggest negative business impact for them is that the new version makes talented developers less likely to want to work there. When Gmail first came out, it was breath of fresh air. It showed how to do email right. I remember wishing that I worked a company that could create such brilliant software.
So I clicked through to the "simple HTML" version as soon as the link presented itself at the bottom of the fancy new splash screen and have been a little less unhappy ever since.
Now I just need to quit talking about it and finally finish my move out of Google's house. Everything else is out except for the email. The damn email.
Sources:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020032...
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8w03ms/is_it_poss...
Yes it was the first time on load, but why did Gmail take 30 seconds to load before it was usable? Why did a website take as long to load as my entire OS? 32GB of RAM, 4+4 cores, what the hell is going on?
I just tested again, 34 seconds from hitting enter at "gmail.com" to getting a compose window loaded.
Gmail used to be lightening fast, an example of what an amazing HTML5 webapp could be. Now it is a joke.
Consider all the people who still use sysvinit and (a fork of) GNOME 2. (Yes, I think many who oppose systemd do so because of the UI change.) And consider the much larger group that initially opposed that were strong opponents for a while but have now moved on.
may be the existing UI works fine, and having invested the effort in using it only to be forced to abandon it once again.
Imagine if a car manufacturer keeps changing the wheel and the pedals around.
I really got bugged in 2011 when they got rid of their terminal theme [0].
I don’t think this is a UI issue, I think it’s just poor design where a skin would somehow not perform well. It seems pretty easy to maintain different simple skins or to provide an API.
[0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...
I could give a hoot about the redesign, but the fact that it now regularly takes 5-10 seconds to switch to my “sent” or “drafts” folders— an action which happened practically instantly in 2008– is unacceptable and has prompted me to begin migrating to another email service.
I know I could use Thunderbird— which I used to— but I’ve come to rely on the web app for access away from my own computers. I’m preliminarily quite happy with Fastmail.
So far I’m finding it awful. Miss my bundling and I miss swiping to snooze on iOS (swiping both directions archives in iOS though I’ve heard it’s configurable in Android)
I think it's a good time to test out a few self-hosted email clients, perhaps storing emails on a mail server that retrieves incoming mail from gmail, and sends out via gmail as well to avoid the authentication/blacklisting/spam filtering hassles.
RainLoop looks pretty good for a web client. Any suggestions on clients or mail servers (only to fetch mail from gmail or outlook)?
And of course I hate the new UI. The information density is low and the graphics are (e.g. the Important and Star markers) visibly blurry under non-96 DPI.
The world is filled with people with slower connections, slower computers, and people who access their email in a different environment than Chrome on windows. Nearly all of them not a strong minority are adverse to change.
The latest google mail interface which they are on their way to killing so called "inbox" is slower not because it is so feature-full but because its poorly written. On a computer that is reasonably modern click on an email and wait 7 seconds is in a word crap. Inbox is only really designed to run well on chrome and switching browsers to run a single site is like changing religions because you like the other sides hats better.
You know what's comparatively amazing. Viewing email in emacs via mu4e and being able to access information in your mail even when you aren't connected to the internet and reading searching and composing as fast as your fingers and eyeballs work rather than waiting for a slow web only resource.
Via xwidgets it can even render pretty html if you need to.
Even though I'm using something else, Eudora still rocks by the way. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-eudora-email-client...
As others have mentioned: a vocal minority always dislike UI changes, but in six months it will be the new normal.
One thing I will say though, it’s starting to look like we’ve run out of good UI changes and what we’re served up now is the refried beans / day old reheated leftovers of UI design.
Anyway, the elephant in the room is: move away from Gmail / free email services. Email, for me, is way too important to have no paid support.
Paid support (and other features) is $1.99/mo.
Also, paid support is just one piece of the puzzle. More important is to not be locked in.
So buy your own domain and if you really want Gmail then pay for G Suite.
Gmail is the slowest web app I use.
From what I've read Google, for whatever reason, don't care about Gmail perf and use slow deprecated APIs in Firefox and Edge even when faster ones are available. The DOM looks like garbage with massive amounts of unnecessary elements.
It's basically the opposite pf everything every Chrome Developer Advocate says about web performance.
Like you said, the input alone has crazy latency. But the logic built into their formatting sends me through the roof most of the time.
Don't want bold text? Too bad, you're getting bold text because you enabled bold text one time about 10 minutes ago. Even though you disabled bold text, like, a second after you enabled it, you just now hit the enter key so you get bold text! And don't you even think about returning to non-formatted typing after you just pasted-in some text which may or may not have had formatting applied even though you did the very special kind of paste where plain, non-formatted text is supposed to be rendered!
Clearly, it has affected me.
They did the same thing to YouTube, however there is a nice Chrome extension to force the old version.
- It's ugly
- It's a bad UX
I am so disappointed that this one is the first complaint about a software I'm writing after Windows ME. So, a "welcome" to GMail ME. Please, Google correct it or give us back the previous version.
https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp
You might have to log out completely. It works consistently when I open it in a private window on Firefox 62. Also you'll probably get a prompt to install the mobile app, just click the "not interested" link at the bottom of the page. Your mileage may vary.
I use Thunderbird and Roundcube, but I could also use Evolution if I wanted to or Microsoft Mail on my Windows machine or even fire up Squirlmail in a docker container.
Even if you have 6+ computers.
Anyway, what’s painful about setting up multiple clients?
OK, but "huge headache" is somewhat exaggerated. For many clients, gmail connection settings are a preset option, where you enter a username and application password. It's a one-time configuration.
> outlook
My condolences.
> my 6+ separate computers
You are perhaps an outlier? But I can see how it's a hassle in your particular case.
The only way to settle this one, is to wait for one of the following groups of people to go extinct:
- those who like round things - those who like rectangles
Yet another meaningless google discussion.
A few hundred upset users can be misleading.
But even if they were 100,000, that would be a small fraction of the user base and you could still say the user base is either indifferent or satisfied with the change.
What they hopefully do is check the metrics, e.g. of how many people switch to desktop mail clients and basic html view.
And honestly the new UI doesn't disrupt my workflow that much. You can like or not like the roundedness or that it got slower, but the workflow can stay almost the same. Therefore I'd say the current change is at least better then when they switched to teh Google-plus-everything mode a few years ago and fucked up all processes and all static links.
They probably consulted the Abuser's Handbook to find that you have to boil the frog slowly.
Clearly they did check the metrics for users switching to the old gmail interface, because they removed the option to revert.
