> Important: To use the new view, you must turn on Chat in Gmail and set Chat to the left hand panel. Learn how to turn on Chat in Gmail.

"c'mon, use our messaging products again"

Still can't get over how they threw away Inbox[1]. That should have been the new default for everybody, not thrown away.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail

I shudder at the amount of retraining non technically sophisticated users will need. The doctors, teachers, and everyday people who just want their e-mail to work so they can worry about their real jobs will all have some annoying cognitive load forced on them for reasons that benefit Google and not them.

Is there any way to alleviate the problem of these forced UX transitions? At the time, Gmail was pretty revolutionary for what it offered (a large, free email account), but as the cost of compute and storage has declined, its pretty cheap to store 10GB-15GB of email in an mbox file or similar data store, fronted with JMAP [1], which any client or web front end that supports it could talk to. Is asking for long term support of a fronend (~10 years) unreasonable as long as the underlying API version is still supported?

[1] https://jmap.io/

(fastmail user, no other affiliation)

How many (HN) Gmail users still use the Gmail interface? I remember giving up on it as a primary interface in the mid-to-late '00s, my laptop was crappy and the interface had slowed down so much that it was nearly unusable. There was visible lag while typing a message on my circa 2003 cheap HP laptop (I was a student, it was what I could afford). It was like getting sent back to 1996 and typing out documents in Word on a 486 (In 1996, I was only typing at 30 wpm and would easily get ahead of the system. Type up a paragraph, sit back and wait while it appeared on screen.)

I've only used it since when needing to type a long form email or grab some critical information from an email while traveling and borrowing a friend or family member's computer. I haven't even done that in years thanks to smartphones.

Another Google 'enhanced user experience' which I will hate.

I just wish they'd fix the performance. The bizarre thing is that it used to be fast while offering more or less the same functionality with more or less the same interface, and it's actually regressed. I'm not sure what on earth they have done, but they're doing something objectively wrong.

It's promotion packet season at Google again, I see.

it's guess time for the $PROMOTION_CYCLE periodic redesign!

I ditched (all of) Google 2 weeks ago after 15+ years of having an account. I don't miss it. One of the last major annoyances before I escaped was the ever-decreasing amount of screen-real-estate that seemed to be available to actually use: this new eye-candy version seems to confirm that continuing trend, so I'm happy to be out of it.

So, what is the fundamental difference for me as a user between google chat's integration into gmail, and google talk's integration into gmail that they added back in 2006 and removed 7 years later? Both were chat features that allowed me to talk with my contacts.

https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/07/screen-shots-of-gmail-chat...

It seems google has gone full circle and is building things they've already built and killed once before. I don't particularly mind, I'm just not going to rely on any of this stuff because in a few years they will kill it and replace it by something else.

You know what would be an awesome user setting?

-Under no circumstances do I want your update unless it's to circumvent a genuine security threat or addresses a genuine pain point that real users complain about on HN, Reddit or, if it exists, your user forums

They had right button panel and top right app menu button which shows panel of icons, I guess those are projects under different teams?, so new team starts adding panel on left side.

The design reflects team/org chart, just as you would expect in a big org.

Stop messing with my UX! Stability is a feature!

It’s quite tiring how often they change this. Gmail is a horrible, cluttered, and slow UI. I have started migration to my own mail server with opensmtpd, dovecote, mutt and Rainloop for web mail.

It's funny that right now there isn't a single comment that mentions something positive about the new interface.

It's either completely terrible or - more likely - people hate change.

Nobody cares about google chat, I have it set to auto respond with a message that says use slack. If people were looking for an excuse to move, this might be the catalyst. Training a non-technical workforce can cost millions, so maybe we switch to something else people don't need to be trained on. WTF is Google thinking...

Gmail used to offer major up changes as a option u had to enable/turn on. I wish they would go back to this. I’m now dreading the many calls/texts I’ll get today asking how to switch back to the old gmail.

(Side note- how is it that the leader in search, STILL does not support wildcard or partial word searching in gmail)

Dear Google: please leave well enough alone

I am not associated with this product, but a very happy customer.

https://simpl.fyi/about

It is a plugin that emulates some of the now-removed Inbox functionality, and generally makes Gmail more pleasant to deal with.

Sweet, now I can get the worthless Meet tab directly in the web version. Can't wait for it to only be GMail and Meet and have no other apps, because their enterprise offerings (with other worthless apps) cause changes to everything else.

My response to any Google announcement these days is "What's in it for Google?". I used to love Google when it was a scrappy startup with amazing tech, now I just assume they're trying new ways to shaft me.

They highlight the "app main menu" on the left, but say nothing about an identical app menu on the right? Why do both exist?

I like Gmail, but I am slowly migrating to Protonmail, exposing all my purchases and personal details to an ad company sounds wrong.

Is it any faster after this? I’m using Fastmail which is snappy to navigate around in and not sluggish when I type.

Fascinating to me that Gmail is not an app platform yet. Could be huge.