Do you think it's time Gmail got a bit of a refresh? Drag and Drop, better contact management, reader and calendar intergration?

Maybe they should release a 'google communications'? email, contacts, reader, calendar, sms, phone.

What do others think?

I agree with that, GMail deserves a little more love from Google's side.

However I'm against a total overhaul, adding drag & drop and calendar would be cool but I don't want it to have a cluttered interface like Zimbra.

thats fair enough. so what would like you liek to see added or taken away from gmail?

Better contact management is a definitive must. Besides from that, it is pretty much feature complete. Better integration with other Google services would be nice too. Especially better integration with reader and calendar.

I would like to see the back-end being slimmed down, I sometimes get brief lags or what look like CPU/ load issues. I realized I can almost live with the "basic HTML" variant of Gmail, which also allows me to open links in a new window natively (by using browser functions), and always allows me to use the back and forward buttons and so on, except for the lack of address auto-completion when you enter an email. So, I think a little less DHTML (or a refactored, optimized back-end) and a little more accessibility would be neat, even for the "normal" Gmail version...

Philipp: Your side of the world might not be getting as much love then. I can't remember the last time I ever had load issues with Gmail. Other than the Google main home page and Finance it's their fastest loading service here in San Diego.

Faster than Google Alerts?
http://www.google.com/alerts

(Don't know much about it, but) Ajax based services are quite fast, because it is getting updated every minute or so.

That's why it's fast. isn't it?

>> That's why it's fast. isn't it?

No. Instead of reloading entire pages every time an action is performed – which can be several hundred KB in size each – small chunks of JS, XML or HTML are sent and received instead. These usually then cause some some client-side scripts to be called which can change the page dynamically using DHTML. By sending and receiving less data, these sites usually appear to be much faster.

Of course, if too many unnecessary updates and refreshes are happening in the background, this can significantly slow things down and cause problems. And if poorly written client-side scripts are being executed, that can also affect the memory usage of your web browser and slow down your PC.

I think Gmail is fine just the way it is. I personally don't need any drag and drop support (think it will make the app slower or taking longer to load and that's a thing i don't want. I want a fast and easy app)
If I'm searching a specific mail, I either search for it using the search box or the labels. I would be too lazy to sort my mails manually via drag and drop ;)
What could be added are some new features that makes your life easier (don't know any right now). But pls keep the UI the way it is. That's why i prefer Gmail in contrast to the other competitors.

Well, it's rumored that Gmail is soon to release a version that uses Google Gears for offline access (and really, even if that rumor is fake it's obvious that they would release something like this and fairly soon), so hopefully the slim-down of the backend would be part of that since it would most likely require some rework of the backend.

thats a good point niraj.

Do you think we'll see grand central intergrated within gmail/talk? send sms via gmail, and receive calls/voicemail via chat?

I hate I can't open my inbox in new tab

we haven't seen an update for a while. surely they must we working on something relatively big. or do you think team members have gone to other projects?