I've used the basic html mode before when the normal (js heavy) one was a bit slow, and it ended up being much faster even if every action requires a whole new page request/render.
I thought the whole idea of JavaScript-heavy frontends was to make things faster. A rhetorical question: How is it that Google is somehow a leader in frontend technology and design when they often don't practice what they preach?
I'm sure it achieves that when you use Chrome on a recent developer workstation and only have one tab running. There is a nice JIT in the browser, plenty of RAM, and lots of high-end cores available for the task.
Today I'm struggling with 8 GiB of RAM and 2 cores. Admittedly I have many tabs open, but that is to be expected. Web site creators might believe that the world revolves around their web site, but really it does not, and so they must share my machine.
Weaker systems are of course unusable. Suppose the hardware is a 32-bit PowerPC Mac with one core and 512 MiB of RAM, and there are a bunch of tabs open to similarly taxing web sites or worse. I've mostly had to retire a system like this, which makes me really annoyed because it is quiet due to being fanless.
Note that the "weaker system" described above is not really weak. Long ago, I used the old gmail just fine with far less. There was a time when 32 MiB of RAM was enough to open several browser windows (we didn't have tabs) and run them. JIT didn't even exist yet, but the web ran fine.
It's the usual problem I think: software developers are rewarded with high-end developer workstations to keep them happy and productive, and then they test the software all by itself on this high-end hardware and everything looks good. Nobody is testing on older low-end hardware with lots of other things running in the background.
They pretty much started it. Google maps was probably the first real attempt at a “single page application” written in JavaScript. Everything else at the time trying to do the same thing was java/activex. Chrome also pushed JavaScript speed so much it enabled doing much more complex things with it. They’ve just become a much bigger company since thenwhich makes being “nimble” a lot harder.
According to https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en, the following link should set it to basic html mode (I haven't tested it) https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui
I've used the basic html mode before when the normal (js heavy) one was a bit slow, and it ended up being much faster even if every action requires a whole new page request/render.