Monday, November 12, 2007

Gmail Has Become Faster & Slower

Google recently rolled out a new version of the Gmail JavaScript framework, making it faster in many occasions (a planned redesign is also in the works – compare the screenshots leaked to the Google OS blog with your current design, you’ll spot some layout differences). For instance, opening a mail in the inbox display – or trashing the mail, or flagging it as spam – is now in the impressive realms of “instant” (micro-seconds, I guess... the kind of delay the brain won’t notice). However, Gmail also started to become slower on other occasions.

Here’s one lag that I stumble upon a lot during daily work: sometimes when I come a cross a page, I quickly want to send it to someone else. What worked well before was to open Gmail.com, hit the Compose link, type the name of the recipient, let Gmail’s auto-completion do its magic, and send the mail. Now, that same task has a considerable delay because the auto-completion takes much longer to load during the initial start-up of Gmail. Repeating the same steps as before, entering the name will now not result in any auto-completion at all, unless you constantly type something in the address field until it finished loading the auto-completion data (apparently). So if your friend’s name is “Fred” you’ll now end up typing “Fred”, then delete the “d”, then type it again, and so on until the auto-completion is triggered.

What are your experiences with the new Gmail?

Gmail Has Become Faster & ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (34)

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