Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great.
Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.
Switching email providers is reasonably painless, fwiw. Set up forwarding, migrate mail when you can.
Even better if you set up the majority of your non-security-essential mail to be at your own domain, hosted by Fastmail/etc. Then you can easily change your email provider and your contacts don't even care. I've yet to implement this is in my own life, I just switched to fast mail - so I can't speak from personal experience on the domain portion of it.
NOTE: I mentioned non-security-essential email in reference to things like, your bank login or things that could threaten your life essentials. I say this because theoretically (and has happened before), using your own domain increases the attack surface area. My personal plan is to setup custom domain email with Fastmail, but still use the plain me@fastmail.com for my security focused emails. The majority of my email will still be based on my custom domain for easy portability, but I plan to avoid that for my bank, for example... assuming fast mail lets me.
I can speak from experience regarding FastMail because that's exactly what I did. In fact, I migrated off a grandfathered Google Apps account with my custom domain to FastMail with that same domain. Yeah, it's a bunch of steps, but I'm very comfortable with making DNS changes. My wife and I have an account; it's worth every penny.
Also, FastMail allows for subdomain handling. I use this feature with nearly every site. You can have *@<YourFastMailId>.<YourDomain>.com route to <YourFastMailId>@<YourDomain>.com just as you'd expect. The way this handling works is even configurable.
Another very happy user of FastMail here, with our own domain. I initially was excited by subdomain handling, but switched back to only using my main account.
Using FastMail-specific features will lock you into this specific vendor once again, one of the main reasons to switch in the first place!
To be fair, how FastMail does catch-all delivery like this is standard and easily reproduced st any mail vendor (except Office 365) that supports catch-all, which is most of them. I use a catch-all address with FastMail that is @asubdomainichose.mydomain.org and it is the same subdomain I used with my previous setup before moving to FastMail.
Using a subdomain for catch-all is great because spammers can’t easily discover and flood the subdomain.
I'm in the weird Google Apps for Your Domain limbo right now myself. I've wondered what would happen if I switched to something other than GMail but kept my google account with that email address.
I know a long time ago you could set up a Google account using a non-GMail email address but I'm not sure if that's even a thing anymore. That's what I want though. Keep the email address with my own domain that I've used for 17 years and just have a regular old Google account using that email (and keep all my Google services and purchases associated with it).
Google has been absolutely terrible to Google Apps for Your Domain users (who were often Google's biggest supporters back in the day). They've been shoved into this weird second class status where their Google accounts only partially work with Google services. I completely regret ever setting it up.
I use Google services heavily at work, all on a Google account that was created with my work email address. And we are not a Google shop; my employer's email is self-hosted Exchange.
You can continue using your email address for your Google account even if you've got someone else handling the mail now. You can also sign up for a Google account with an email account from any domain or provider.
I switched to Fastmail years ago and it was the best mail-related thing I ever did. I was dreading the migration but it literally took ten minutes, switch DNS records (I have my own domain), run Fastmail's import, done.
I still can't believe how fast the UI is. It's by far the fastest web app I've ever used, and the same goes for the service in general.
Seriously, just ditch Gmail now, the alternatives are great.
FastMail supports CalDAV. I use my FastMail calendar with Thunderbird (Lightning) and on my iPhone; works great. They also support CardDAV for contacts. /satisfied FM customer since ~2008 or so
Why is jjawssd's (sister) comment dead? Davdroid works great and is free (as in beer and speech), though I would encourage people to donate if it's useful to you.
I use Radicale and find it great, but there's no UI, so you need to use whatever client you want that supports CalDAV (I use Lightning and the calendar on my phone). Lately I've been liking Nextcloud a lot, and that's a one-stop solution for lots of things, so nowadays I would recommend that if you have a home server or want to pay someone to host it.
Yeah, you do. As I said above, Fastmail's calendar is very good too, and you can load your self-hosted/CalDAV calendars into it, so that's a good option.
FastMail is standards-based, so it does not support labels. This is a good thing, and you should stop depending on Google-specific proprietary features. Even when I was on Gmail, I had a lot of issues with labels because the third party mail clients I needed to use didn't support them. The inbox tabs I ended up replacing in Gmail with rules/filters, that moved my social updates, for instance, to an actual social folder which worked properly on third party clients.
That being said, FastMail is also the leading developer/champion of a new mail standard called JMAP, which supports both labels and folders. I suspect, therefore, if it takes off, they may consider supporting labels themselves.
I've recently switched to MacOS's built in mail client with IMAP to Gmail, never have to wait for my UI to do something. So count me in as surprised how far gmail has gone downhill.
That's the thing that gets me. So many optimisations have gone into user interface software over the years. And some of the stories of early Apple work, like 'round rects [0]' are truly inspirational.
I wrote software using Cocoa about a decade ago (so I may be out of touch), and it was clear how much thought and effort had gone into making the user interface responsive. And it generally shows.
The idea that you would just give up on that precedence is baffling. And let's face it, email's important but it's not rocket science.
What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.
If you experience a reproducible Firefox performance problem, please consider using the Firefox profiler add-on [1] to record a profile and file a bug with "[qf]" to the whiteboard field. These "[qf]" Firefox performance bugs get reviewed by engineers twice a week. Having a profile makes the bugs much easier to diagnose.
I think that Chrome also suffers on this front? But it's better at doing pre-fetching than Firefox is
This could really just be that part. I have a hard time imagining explicit sabotage of FF on the gmail frontend. The likeliest explanation is that perf testing and the like only happens in Chrome
It's tricky to share a screen recording because there's personal information. But I just did two for my own curiosity. From a fresh load, once the "Loading Gmail" screen has gone away, it took 8 seconds and 11 seconds respectively from clicking 'Compose' to having a new window open.
Maybe there is variability. There are a million combinations of factors out there. I suppose as an engineer you make the trade off of "do I hope for the best case" vs "do I make something that works for a broad audience". The previous version shows that they can make something that works for my own anecdatapoint if they want to.
I have a lot of issues with google apps for business.
Sometimes I have to refresh the browser 5-6 times before it will display any email in the primary inbox as well.
It's just horrible to use in firefox (in arch linux) and I'm currently looking for a new provider.
Protonmail is great but doesnt offer custom domains. If you need domains people mostly mention fastmail but i think there are far better choices like mailbox.org and kolabnow. Mailbox does not look like much from their homepage but it has awesome web client and it extremly reliable private provider thats in bussiness from 90s. I had account there for last 5 years without single problem.
I've experienced both very fast and very slow with the new Gmail on the same machine with Firefox on Linux. It's currently faster than Chromium, but maybe tomorrow I'll see ten-second load times. Who knows? For the record, I use uMatrix (and uBlock Origin on easy mode for client-side cleanup), which might be affecting it somewhat.
I’m a little surprised to read this because Google Mail works fine for me in Firefox (ArchLinux). In fact it’s smoother than some of the Electron-based clients I’ve tried and less painful than trying to get push messages on Thunderbird working (sure, there is always IMAP but that requires regular fetches).
FIY, IMAP actually allows "push messages" via the IDLE extension. If you use K9 on android, it's enabled by default. I never used gmail, but I'd be surprised if the gmail imap server didn't support it (and I would dismiss gmail entirely if it didn't).
Is this a new thing? I don't recall seeing an option for that in Thunderbird (desktop version by the way; not the mobile / Android version) the last time I looked (~9 months ago).
I don't use Thunderbird myself - was just following the discussion on from the OP who did use it. However I've yet to find a client I like so genuinely interested in any suggestions you might have.
I'm currently using mutt with "getmail" (which does support IDLE), which I can recommend -- it's an excellent client, but only if you're fine with tweaking.
I used TB until two years ago, but I gave up with it's unfixed bugs and quirks. I do prefer graphical clients, but not if they are clunky or buggy.
I used Silpheed and Claws for years, but Silpheed locks (or used to lock) the UI during fetch (unacceptable IMHO) while Claws has some critical bugs in the filter/rule logic that made me lose mail in several occasions by refiling into the wrong folder while processing a lot of messages. If you arent't a heavy filter user you might be fine with it though, I think Claws gets a lot of things right.
KMail wasn't bad when I used it, but it was too long ago to make an honest comment today.
Same issue here. Mails not loading, poor initial load time. That is with zero extensions enabled.
I am now using mutt/notmuch/mbsync to prevent having to go through their horrendously slow web interface, and eventually move away from Gmail completely (probably to ProtonMail or fastmail).
> A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing.
Where? The only one I can trigger that does any kind of network is in the inbox, and that's only to get some icons. The text for the options is already loaded.
When we have time we'll have to trace through what it's doing and what components of RFP are causing the failure. (If anyone wants to do that and report in the bug, we (Mozilla/Tor) would much appreciate the contributions!)
Google has becoming increasingly annoying. Every time I browse from work, where I have to use Internet Explorer, I have to suffer Chrome ads. They also require me to solve a Captcha every time I change the number of results per page via the search settings.
In the past few months all our domestic devices have gradually hit that notional condition with Google Search. All the laptops one by one, and then last night my phone. My wife's phone is the only one that can still use their search without a ten-round Recaptcha challenge.
As each device was locked-out from Google I switched the default over to DDG.
What is especially interesting is that this will allow Google to track you on more pages, but that in this case, you can by definition not block the tracker. I've checked, but reCAPTCHA just falls under the general Google Terms of Service.
I don't believe this to be done with that goal, but it is an unfortunate side-effect.
ReCaptcha is like Cloudflare's free DDoS protection: we like to point at these services and complain how people are "ruining the web" by using them because that's what we do on HN. We ignore the big picture and whine.
But I encourage everyone to consider a darker reality: that centralized services by large companies are becoming more and more necessary in a world where it's becoming easier and easier to be an attacker. The internet is kinda broken. Like how half the ISPs in the world don't filter their egress for spoofed IPs because there's no real incentive. That every networked device in every household could unknowingly be part of a botnet because we aren't billed for externalities.
Yeah, maybe it's kinda spooky that now ReCaptcha v3 wants to be loaded on every page. But is that really the take-away? What about the fact that this is what's necessary to detect the next generation of attacker? That you can either use Google's omniscient neural-network to dynamically identify abuse or you can, what? Roll your own? What exactly is the alternative?
Do HNers think this stuff is a non-issue because nobody has every attacked their Jekyll blog hosted on Github Pages (btw, another free service by a large company)?
That is exactly what I was trying to say with the final line in my comment: I do believe that this is necessary; it's just unfortunate that it comes with the tracking side-effect.
So no: the take-away is that this improves reCAPTCHA. A side remark to that is that it also improves Google's ability to track you, and hampers your ability to fight that.
reCAPTCHA can go frick off into a hole. I've stopped using all websites that use reCaptcha because it takes me sometimes 10 minutes to login to them. I also don't feel right providing free data so Google can help a military drone bomb children on busses one day.
They are such a pain point. Especially if you fill out a form accidentally, and have to go through the re-captcha again, and again and again for the most mundane of services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331159
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