The recent upgrades to the Gmail interface are, in general, okay by me. They haven't changed much of anything that I really care about too much. But there were some under-the-hood changes made to presumably make Gmail feel faster. One of them has managed to piss me off on a semi-regular basis.
I end up seeing that about 20% of the time when I go to close my Gmail tab. And that just annoys me. I feel like this effort to focus on perceived responsiveness has actually slowed down the system overall and I end up paying the price when I'm trying to get in and back out of my mailbox quickly.
Am I alone in this?
Posted by jzawodn at November 27, 2007 02:58 PM
Hell no you're not alone. The next time I see it I'm going to print it out nine thousand million times and then send all the printouts in the post to the Gmail team with "don't do this any more" written on each one of them.
You are most definitely not alone. I hit that probably 60% of the time I check my email. Sometimes it's followed up with a "Retrying..." message at the top of the page too.
I appreciate what they were trying to do with it, however I actually find it annoying as well. If I want to click on something and navigate somewhere; just take me there.
Maybe the need a setting you can turn on/off to let you freely navigation without interruption?
Annoying? Yes. Pisses me off? No.
I never really had a problem with it before, it's too bad they went and changed it. I've gotten that a few times, but I don't get nearly as much email as alot of other people.
I think the asynchronousness makes Gmail feel slower. Having ads and different blocks of a page load at different times apparent and makes the experience feel laggy somehow. I have the same complaint about Yahoo Mail Beta though I think it's a considerable upgrade to the original. I don't think the recent changes to Gmail are much to write home about.
Jeremy, I honestly have never seen that dialog. Come to think of it, I rarely close a tab with GMail.
I've never seen that dialog box, but I do my utmost to stick with the earlier version because:
I can't anchor signature tags the way I want to
I still get locked up more often than not when forgetting to switch back to the old version
a recv'd msg with many pictures won't display them all initially, or opening that same msg from the 'sent' folder won't display any of the pics supposedly just sent, or too many times I was told they didn't receive anything anyway.
GMail is on my shit list right now, and I've used it since day one. I swear to God, I am coincidentally checking out Thunderbird for the first time tomorrow (yea, I've been an avid FF'er since day one too!). I wonder if Thunderbird scans my mail like Gmail does (of course I have AdBlock, but still).
If Y!'s new version didn't use that same stupid address book name selection intellisense trick that G uses, I'd go back to my old spam-laiden Y! accounts, just because the JavaScript performs so much nicer. WTF are all those G geeks doing over there lol?
Anyway, hopefully Thunderbird works out. I'll know tomorrow...
Sorry, how could I forget the original reason?
The new version won't give me access to all my address book contacts!
Yahoo! Mail (the new one) has a similar problem. When it gets sluggish, you'll sometimes get an alert saying you can't do something while another action is in progress. That's been annoying for three years now. ;)
I haven't seen it, but I'm running Gmail inside of MailPlane. That shouldn't make any difference, but maybe MailPlane handles that message or something?
Damn, you're not alone... it is really annoying that you are required to click one more time in order to get out of gmail (well, it doesn't always happen to me, but it does - quite often)..
I agree wholeheartedly! It forces many users to "think" when really working with GMail. I wish Google would just get rid of it.
yes! I'm with you there. Also, I find it very annoying when you save a draft and then want to switch quickly to another folder, e.g. the inbox - it now takes a bit longer to save, and it asks 'do you want to navigate away from this page and lose changes?' NO - that's why I told you to save the draft....
I have another complaint with GMail - they don't support the POP3 dele command ( deletion ) via script. You have to manually use their checkboxes. WTF?
I'm having the same problem. Bugs the crap out of me. Also I'm having a problem when going to Gmail directly to compose a message, I can't start typing the name of a sender into the send box and see a list of my contacts show up. I have to wait a few seconds and then try before the data is available. Lame!
There's a whole other set of issues if you're using IMAP. I like to read in Thunderbird and occasionally use the Web client to search.
It used to work just fine. With the new implementation, trying to log in to Gmail on the Web when I'm logged in via IMAP kicks me out of my Google account altogether.
That's odd. I'm using the new version, heavily, always under FF2.x and always with many tabs open. I churn pretty heavy on the tabs, so I close and reopen GMail often (I use system level Gmail Notifier on some of my systems) and have not ever seen this.
How can I replicate this problem?
I've noticed this in the oddest of ways.
My wife regularly leaves gmail open in the background and we've taken to watching some online content (Discovery Channel's Last One Standing, anyone?) on her laptop.
We've notice that Gmail now causes the audio and video to spit and hang as long as it is open, especially after she has finished a flurry of mailing from the Gmail app.
The only solution is to let it die down (and I presume finish up its pending tasks) and then close it out.
Very strange.
I see the exact same thing for a lot of pages in IE. Maybe it is just an industry standard thing. It is a check in case someone is about to do something they didn't mean to or that one didn't realise the consequences of. If it is for something major (e.g. delete the operating system) this makes sense, but if it is for something minor like this, the annoyance of having to go through the check all the time is worse than the occassional time when it is usefull. I think they got the balance wrong in this case.
I use gmail a lot and I've never seen this popup. But I never close the gmail tab ;)
It's frustrating for anyone who uses Gmail as a primary email source to have that thing pop up all the time. Any way to turn it off?
> Maybe the need a setting you can turn on/off
> to let you freely navigation without interruption?
Something bad as this shouldn't be an option. For 99% of all cases the designers of a software need to decide what's best and then go with it.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059.html
I been using Gmail and never had this kind of pop-up before, maybe it's just an issue with IE.
Actually Jeremy, I have yet to run into that alert box. Maybe I'm just one of those lucky few. But I hope it doesn't start nagging me like it seems it does to a few people here. As that is the only personal email I use now. I've lost site with my spam from everywhere Y! email and a few others I actually forgot where I have them.
Hello,
I want to send a zip file to my friend, but everytime the error is coming as " error code 008". When they send me zip files , there is no issue. Please help me in this matter.
Regards
Gopika Krishnan
