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Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout

Posted by kdawson on from the still-the-same-primary-colors dept.

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."

19 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. 2.0? by Sporkinum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess I didn't realize that gmail was past 1.0 yet. I thought it was still a beta.

    --
    "He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
    1. Re:2.0? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

      You prefer that users expect 1.0 to mean 'beta'?

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      This guy's the limit!
    2. Re:2.0? by Chelloveck · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The whole "Beta" thing that google and company do is really starting to piss me off. It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

      I lay the blame at the feet of open source developers who started this nonsense. Far too many open source utilities have had years of stable versions numbered <1.0. These apps are in permanent "beta" simply because the developers don't want take responsibility for a finished product. It ate your hard drive? Ooh, sorry. You gotta expect some bugs in a beta. We expect it to be finalized sometime before the heat death of the universe. But don't quote us on that.

      --
      Chelloveck
      I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
    3. Re:2.0? by muszek · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Yeah, but you can't really call something a beta when 110% of world's population is using it as a primary email service.

    4. Re:2.0? by alexgieg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You prefer that users expect 1.0 to mean 'beta'?
      Thanks to Microsoft, I think most already do. Isn't it common nowadays for users in general, and those in TI in particular, to expect any new OS developed by them to only work correctly after its first service pack? I know I do. 2000 wasn't good. 2000 SP-1 (or more, I don't remember) made it good. XP wasn't good. XP SP-1 was. Vista isn't good. Vista SP-1 probably will be. And so on and so forth.

      Actually, even back in the days Microsoft used numbers to differentiate product versions, it was common sense that "x.0" versions weren't worth it. Those who knew advised users to prefer a previous version with a higher number after the dot, as by then it would be stable and actually working as expected...

      In short: whenever Google decides to remove the "beta" tag from Gmail, I doubt they're going to call it "Gmail 1.0". It wouldn't be good for business.
      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    5. Re:2.0? by Timex · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It ate your hard drive? Ooh, sorry. You gotta expect some bugs in a beta.

      Uhh... No. If it ate my hard drive, it's alpha.

      I expect "beta" to work somewhat, though without the full functionality that the developer wants it to have. Sure, it may have bugs that cause it to crash sometimes (or often), but I the more violent, destructive sorts of repercussions, I relegate to alpha-level software.

      If you happen to be talking about disk defragmenting software on the other hand, that's something else entirely.
      --
      When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
    6. Re:2.0? by calebt3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why not? If everybody on earth would suddenly start using some Linux distro that is currently in beta, it would still be in beta. Granted, it would likely get out of beta pretty quickly thanks to all the Linux devs coming from other projects, but for a time, it would still be a beta.

  2. Well, that explains it by bwintx · · Score: 3, Insightful
    From TFA (first link):

    If there's a downside to Google's upgrade, it's that third-party extensions to Gmail may stop working.
    So now I know why my GMail notifier add-on to Firefox died in the last couple of days. Went with Google's own notifier applet as a substitute in the meantime, but would prefer the old way. We'll see how soon that becomes possible.
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  3. Screw the interface... by neokushan · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Just give me bigger attachments.

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    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  4. Re:Not deploying with any rhyme or reason... by Thrakamazog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing. Perhaps she should not be using a beta version then.
  5. Re:JavaScript back-end? by logixoul · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Backend here probably refers to the custom JS framework they use to do the dirty work. I can see that getting faster.

  6. Re:Oh dear.. by benbean · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's called minimalism, and it's one of the many reasons why gmail is as good as it is.

    --
    It's a Unix system - I know this.
  7. Re:Not deploying with any rhyme or reason... by nschubach · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unfortunately, Beta is the new "hip". (or the new Black if you prefer) Somewhere along the line it was decided that you are edgy and groundbreaking if you "get into beta." I actually had one of my friends tell me I wasn't a real gamer because I didn't get into a beta test. (Coincidentally, I am/was not a FilePlanet subscriber and these were the only people "accepted", so I didn't feel a huge loss by it since I didn't have to pay to bug test.)

    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  8. Re:JavaScript back-end? by Khuffie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From a purely client-side perspective, what he sees, the images, html and all that, is the front-end. What deals with all the different states on the client-side, is also the back-end.

  9. Why not use a protocol concieved for attachments? by xtracto · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just give me bigger attachments.
    Sheesh, when will people understand that EMAIL was *not* concieved for large binary attachements... and that UUENCODE is just a hack allowing that... if you want to send a big file just upload it to an FTP and mail the ftp:// link... or use teh usenet!

    In a more on-topic comment, when will people at google fix their broken javascript so that gmail can work properly with Konqueror web browsers?, sure they are all for open source and summer of coding, but can't they just pay one of their monkeys to fix their javascript hacks to make them standard compliant?

    I say, screw the interface [improvements], at least make it work well!

    --
    Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
  10. Re:JavaScript back-end? by BESTouff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's the frontend's backend. What's hard to understand here ?

  11. FTP loses based on ease of use by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sheesh, when will people understand that EMAIL was *not* concieved for large binary attachements...


    They won't. Not trying to be snide but that battle was lost long ago. It does not matter that FTP is technically more efficient and better designed for file transfer. Attaching a file is simple and, like it or not, using an ftp server involves more steps, additional software, additional security, and additional training. FTP fails the mom test. It's harder than attaching a file for NO additional benefit to the user in 99.999999% of cases. Furthermore, most people do not have or know about ftp servers, they have email accounts. So they use the tool they have and know how to use.

    Does this cause problems for the network admins? Sure. Doesn't matter though. Ease of use/learning for the user wins here. If you want ftp to be used, make it easier to use than attaching a file and people will flock to it. Until then, it's going to be used only by nerds like me in the few special cases where ftp is the only alternative.
  12. Re:Why not use a protocol concieved for attachment by MonoSynth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...and how are binaries on usenet less hackish than binaries in e-mail??

  13. Didn't even know I had it by superstick58 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    After seeing this article, I took a closer look at my GMail interface (the contacts part). I did notice I've been running the updated version this whole time! I didn't even realize it. It's pretty subtle if you just look at your inbox all day like I often do. The new contacts is kind of nice even though I haven't had much time to explore it. However, in just a few minutes of clicking things I did manage to break the interface running in Firefox. After clicking from Drafts to Contacts, the interface just got "stuck". I now can't go back to my inbox or any other subsection and my contacts aren't showing up. A complete refresh though fixed that. Anyway, I look forward to picking through the new tweaks to the interface.