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Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout
Stony Stevenson writes "Google on Tuesday confirmed it is giving Gmail a new look. This blog post has screenshots of a new Gmail interface that has been made available to a limited number of users. They are calling it "Gmail 2.0" even if Google isn't. Google confirmed the update is underway at its new San Francisco office, just prior to a briefing on an unrelated upcoming Google announcement. A Google spokesperson said that the new look has been made available to about one percent of all Gmail users and is being rolled out the rest on an ongoing basis."
...thanks to a JavaScript back-end rewrite...I highly doubt that GMail uses JavaScript on the back-end. In fact, it is pretty well known that GMail is written in Java and only uses JavaScript on the front-end.
Apparently, one of Google's goal in releasing this new version is to provide a new code framework that will help them to speed up Gmail's response time in a number of areas. One feature of note is that Gmail now pre-fetches and caches messages in the current view, so when you click on a message, it loads almost instantly. On my broadband connection, I see much improved response--clicking a message now displays it almost instantly--no lags or delays.
-Jim
http://gmailtips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
IMAP seem to be only rolled out to people with English(US) language settings at the moment. To enable IMAP, I had to:
1) Change the language setting from English(UK) to English(US).
2) Go back to settings, and then into the newly available "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab.
3) Enable IMAP.
4) Configure my client (Thunderbird) and make a successful connection.
5) Go back into the settings, and change the language back to English(UK). The "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab changes back to just "Forwarding and POP".
6) Continue using my sweet, sweet, IMAP.
This method is hit and miss it seems. But hopefully some people might be lucky.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
I'm guessing they are calling it 2.0 because of the URL: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2 instead of http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1
But they should be calling it Gmail UI2 instead of 2.0.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I tried it and it sends me back to the old one.
Just use the Customize Google firefox plugin. It will automatically do that for you.
Just set your bookmark to https://mail.google.com/ - you'll start & stay in SSL. I've been doing this for a really long time ( I can't remember when I even created the bookmarks I have in all my browsers to do exactly this. )
Please ignore any obvious problems in this post.
Well, first of all, my initial thought was "WTF happened to my Gmail?" because this change occurred the same day that I installed OS X 10.5 (and the new Safari). Now that I know the changes were made on Gmail's end, it makes more sense.
1) For a while yesterday, the new titlebar/tab of the main Gmail window said: Gmail - Inbox - username@gmail.com (where username is my account name). Now it just says "Gmail". That's right, it doesn't update anymore to say "Inbox (1)" when I get a new mail.
2) Hovering over names in your message list gives a new style pop-up that shows the person's name, email address, and picture. Across the top of the pop-up are styled gradient buttons that say "Email", "Invite to Chat", and "More...". Clicking More will show options for "Recent Conversations" and "Show in Contact List: Auto, Always Show, Never Show, Blocked". Previously, hovering over names in the message list just showed you their email address. The new functionality seems similar to what the old version did when you hovered over your contact / chat list in the sidebar.
3) Chat now works in Safari. There are new (?) options for the chat list, including "Size of chat list: tiny, small, medium, large" and "Show in chat list: Most popular, all". (This may not be new, I never used G Chat in a browser because it didn't work on Safari before).
4) There are new actions to apply to messages. One is "Filter messages like these" the other is "mute". I'm not sure what mute does.
5) As the linked article says, Contacts management is now vastly different. It actually still looks a bit unfinished (or maybe it's just Safari's rendering, but I doubt it).
Gmail's IMAP is broken for any messages in a non-american 7-bit character set, which is why they only enable it for people who declare their default language as EN_US.
I just tried one of my IMAP enabled accounts again, and accented characters (ISO-8859-1 and -14) either show up as a ?, are replaced by the 7 bit equivalent (é becomes i), or are missing. There is a lot of work to shoehorn real-world language support into the IMAP protocol. It's an area I've actively avoided, but could be why the rollout is only for people likely to receive only US-ASCII or CodePage=437.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Firefox + GreaseMonkey + http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html
I believe there might even be a Firefox extension that does this..