Happy Holidays
Written: December 24, 2007 at 4:19PM EST
Happy holidays everyone! And thus ends my longest EVER post! 
Gmail, you have let me down
Written: December 1, 2007 at 4:35PM EST
Let me be the first to say, I have had a gmail account since Summer 2004. I fell in love with the service right from the start. The amount of space, the ease of use, and the entire thing overall. I have spread the word and now many of my friends use the program as well.
The creation of the google talk program seemed like a plus to me, albeit not entirely useful. Still I use it for communicating with google fanboys. Integration to the service however seemed like overkill. It just slowed down the service too much. I clicked the link and made it vanish, and it actually made quite a bit of difference.
Then, as the years went by and the service became more and more popular, downtimes became common. I stayed confident that it would only be temporary, and for quite some time, it wasn’t looking that way. But, to my amazement as well as to my friends, the downtimes became less and less common.
Then you went and redeveloped gmail from the ground up. Supposedly, they have “spent a lot of time profiling all parts of the application, shaving milliseconds off wherever we can, and figuring out workarounds for some pretty deep-rooted issues with the current browser implementations. Some of the most common actions should be faster now.” To this I have one simple remark.
“HAH!”
I have yet to see any positive changes in speed in the service. In fact, loading times have seemed to double (even triple on some days). I will admit that I do have a lot of mail, but according to google, I should “never need to delete another message.” Basically they’re contradicting themselves.
The part I find most interesting is the fact that gmail is able to crash my browser. When loading the mailbox, trying to send a new message, or even “search[ing] to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.” It’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to even read my mail!
Now, before I get chewed out, let me state the following. I have indeed tried disabling/uninstalling all my firefox addons. Each and every one, whether it was deleted or not made no difference whatsoever. Secondly, I have tried using different browsers, and that didn’t even seem to help.
From what I’ve read, I’m not the only one having problems with the service crashing browsers. It just seems ridiculous that a service should overload a browser as to crash it. And besides that, I don’t even really see that many differences between this version and the older version (aside from the old one working). It’s quite frustrating really.
Now, I’m going to get people telling me to “click the link and switch to the ‘old version’.” Sadly, I can’t even do that. As soon as I log in, I get the “Loading” button (nothing else), on the page. Then the browser freezes up and crashes. I have no opportunity to even click the link. Then the part which really annoys me, if I do get a chance to click the link, it won’t save between logins! You should be able to change that in your preferences.
Bookmarking the “old version” shouldn’t be required. Call it lazy, call it whining, call it whatever, you shouldn’t have to do that just to use a webmail program. I don’t use bookmarks as it is, I find it just as easy to type http://gmail.com into the address bar and click enter, so I’ll be damned to bookmark a page in gmail just to get it to work.
And so I will conclude with just a simple message. This of course can apply to anyone who has a well-used service/program. Let the users decide to implement the change instead of doing it for them. Google and Microsoft have that in common. Force them to use buggy software, and they just may not return— you’re share of the market means nothing if your users lose faith.