Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: How Do You Like the New Gmail UI? (vortex.com)
Earlier today, Google pushed out the biggest revamp of Gmail in years. In addition to a new material design look, there are quick links to other Google services, such as Calendar, Tasks, and Keep, as well as a new "confidential mode" designed to protect users against certain attacks by having the email(s) automatically expire at a time of the sender's choosing. Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein shares their initial impressions of Google's new Gmail UI: Google launched general access to their first significant Gmail user interface (UI) redesign in many years today. It's rolling out gradually -- when it hits your account you'll see a "Try the new Gmail" choice under the settings ("gear") icon on the upper right of the page (you can also revert to the "classic" interface for now, via the same menu). But you probably won't need to revert. Google clearly didn't want to screw up Gmail, and my initial impression is that they've succeeded by avoiding radical changes in the UI. I'll bet that some casual Gmail users might not even immediately notice the differences.
The new Gmail UI is what we could call a "minimally disruptive" redesign of the now "classic" version. The overall design is not altered in major respects. So far I haven't found any notable missing features, options, or settings. My impression is that the back end systems serving Gmail are largely unchanged. Additionally, there are a number of new features (some of which are familiar in design from Google's "Inbox" email interface) that are now surfaced for the new Gmail. Crucially, overall readability and usability (including contrast, font choices, UI selection elements, etc.) seem so close to classic Gmail (at least in my limited testing so far) as to make any differences essentially inconsequential. And it's still possible to select a dark theme from settings if you wish, which results in even higher contrast. Have you tried the new Gmail? If so, how do you like the new interface?
The new Gmail UI is what we could call a "minimally disruptive" redesign of the now "classic" version. The overall design is not altered in major respects. So far I haven't found any notable missing features, options, or settings. My impression is that the back end systems serving Gmail are largely unchanged. Additionally, there are a number of new features (some of which are familiar in design from Google's "Inbox" email interface) that are now surfaced for the new Gmail. Crucially, overall readability and usability (including contrast, font choices, UI selection elements, etc.) seem so close to classic Gmail (at least in my limited testing so far) as to make any differences essentially inconsequential. And it's still possible to select a dark theme from settings if you wish, which results in even higher contrast. Have you tried the new Gmail? If so, how do you like the new interface?
'Basic HTML' mode still works for me.. So I'm happy with the UI.. :)
It is so similar to the last theme I'm not sure I'd have even noticed the change. Why is this slight graphics refresh a news story?
Maybe because I wipe out years ago any "tab" other than "mail" and used "compact" view always.
My gmail is exactly the same as always. No visual change at all.
Almost instantly reverted. The new UI wastes so much screen space -- and I'm running in compact mode (in both Classicy and New modes)
* Tabs (Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums) no longer have a vertical line separating them. You HAVE to mouse over them to see where each button ends.
* The left column of Inbox, Important, Sent Mail, etc. is wider.
* The 2nd column which showed the Senders and the number of emails in a thread no longer shows (#) but just the # number by itself.
* The middle columns are now less wide
* A new right column which shows vertical icons of Calendar, Keep, Tasks now wastes space
* The number of lines in the Inbox is now less due to the spacing between threads being increased.
Lauren Weinstein is a corporate shill who thinks ad blockers are unethical :
So i can careless, i POP all my email to Thunderbird until i cant. then will create my own email server but as long as i can POP it im happy.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I use an IMAP client to read my Gmail
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
My IMAP interface with gmail remains unchanged. I have never been infected with the desire to use any webmail, especially Google's. As long as they allow IMAP or POP connections, I will continue to use gmail, but not for anything important.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
We have monochrome designs where we previously had full colour designs (Android, etc) with all the associated loss of valuable information.
We have flat designs where we can't see what's clickable.
We have thinner fonts and lines which are harder to read unless you have perfect vision.
Why isn't there massive pushback from all these changes which reduce usability instead of enhancing it ?
It's not plural in this case.
Their is a gender-neutral pronoun, singular.
Not going into the politics of it, I'm just a writer.
...
Since the bloody article can't even show the visual differences here are screenshots comparing the old and new:
* The left column/sidebar of Inbox, Important, Sent Mail, etc. is wider. Number of unread are now in their own sub-column instead of immediately after the Folder name.
Old left Sidebar
New left Sidebar
* Tabs (Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums) no longer have a vertical line separating them. You HAVE to mouse over them to see where each button ends.
Old Tabs
New Tabs
* The 2nd column which showed the Senders and the number of emails in a thread no longer shows (#) but just the # number by itself making this harder to read.
Old senders
New senders
The Topic column is less wide, meaning you can't see entire short emails now.
Old subject
New subject
Do. Not. Want.
--
"Get off my LAN." -- Grumpy old programmer
Web consoles suck, period. They take twice as long to access and experience severe limitations in the way with which you can interact with them, even for something as simple as an email client.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Here are step-by-step instructions to try out the new UI:
1. Click on Gear top right
2. Click on the first menu choice Try the new Gmail
If you don't see "Try the new Gmail" menu choice -- it hasn't been rolled out to your account (yet).
3. Select the layout Default, Comfortable, Compact
Don't worry if you picked the wrong choice. You can click on gear icon in the top right and the non-descript Display density to choose between the three.
Thankfully we can Go back to classic Gmail for now -- until Google rams it down our throats, whether we want it or not.
I think it's great having the option to always have the calendar up within the Gmail screen. It's something I've wanted for a long time.
The one really annoying piece for me is that the main window tooltips stay up too long (like the Refresh button). If you hover over an icon too long and move the cursor away, the tooltip stays up for over a second. Sounds short but it's way too long. The tooltips for the icons on the right side are timed correctly though.
I use the compact option with a dark theme so I don't see a lot of wasted space.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you!
Gmail's changed something? I haven't noticed any differences in my email client.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
If you don't like the change, dont fret, dont sweat. Just wait for a few minutes. It will change, it is like Pittsburgh weather.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I've no evidence for this, but the way he keeps defending big-G in the wake of all the privacy problems we've seen and continue to feel, he's been touting them as being stellar about privacy and that they would never, and bla.
Maybe it's true that unlike Facebook, Google doesn't sell your data. But the main reason for that is that they want to monetise you all by themselves. Also, nothing would stop them from doing so tomorrow.
Gmail innovations here or there, your best bet is to get rid of Google and Facebook, use plugins like uMatrix and Cookie AutoDelete and navigate the Web without splattering your fingerprints everywhere.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
It doesn't seem to be pushed to apps accounts / G Suite unfortunately.
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Too much emphasis on say the attachments which clutters the whole page and not on say the top tabs. Not too bad in compact mode I guess.
...I abandoned G+ never to go back. I used G+ until it allowed me to use the old interface. G+ would revert back to the new, flat version every once in a while in spite of me going back to the classic version. One day I could not go back to the classic version, and that's when G+ lost a user.
I don't mind doing the same with the Gmail web interface. It's harder to abandon the e-mail system, but it is not difficult to abandon the WEB UI.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
There it is in Thunderbird along with all my other email accounts. They all look alike in their little windows and they all function the same- no learning a different interface for each account. Some of these accounts date back to the last century and all the emails I want to keep are preserved here and on their servers. Never understood the concept of using a browser to read email.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Actual writers know that, in Standard English, the gender-neutral third-person singular possessive is his.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
IMAP/Thunderbird here. Web-based mail is so very Eternal September.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Idiotic. Oddly, gmail UI hasn't changed. not sure why.
Thanks for posting the pics.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The rest of us uses mail programs to read their mail and couldn't care less.
There's no changes to my gmail, perhaps because it's through another domain, just using gmail as a backend? /shrug
That depends a lot on the style manual that you read. My publisher (Pearson - owns InformIT and the several imprints including Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley) recommends alternating male and female pronouns for gender neutral terminology, but permits using the plural. I find the alternating horribly confusing (if you're talking about a single person and switching from he to she every use then it seems like you're talking about two people). I believe that the last two revisions of the Chicago Manual of Style also now endorse use of they and their as gender-neutral pronouns (though earlier editions were strongly against it). I think the Oxford style guide now also recommends 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun, though that was a more recent change.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
G Suite is a separate code base. And it often lags Gmail developments. There are some exemptions to this, but it's a common complaint.
Area51 - We are watching...
When using the search function, the old interface does not highlight the previously-chosen (guessed) message in the search results when you return to it, making it difficult to pick up where you left off.
It's such a minor detail and so useful that I don't know why it is not this way.
The look and feel? It's OK. It doesn't show off MD to its best potential, but it's good enough. I had no problems finding anything, and some of the features, such as associating actions with the emails themselves, were well done.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I found that I could switch to the new UI in the Settings dropdown. I looked at it. I switched back to "Classic" mode.
I'll probably explore the new UI more fully later on. My first impression is that other than some font tweaking, it seems unchanged. Except that now some of the controls are harder to see since the font color almost disappears into my background image.
Personally, I'm not overly impressed by the changes... but those changes aren't so horrible as to make me want to run away and hide in the old interface, either. In fact, the only difference which seems even remotely noteworthy to me, is that the entire interface appears to have become ever so slightly more sluggish -- but even that isn't horrific; it's just mildly annoying. The reality is, the new interface is going to be rolled out to all Gmail users eventually anyway, likely with little or no change from the current state... and ultimately, we'll all just get used to it. Eventually.
But honestly, this feels to me like nothing more than an exercise in change for it's own sake. Basically, they had one or two minor new features which they wanted to roll into the interface, but instead of just shoehorning them into the existing interface -- which almost certainly would have worked just fine -- they decided to use this as an excuse to throw a whole new coat of paint at a wall that really only had a few scratches that nobody even noticed anymore -- except of course for the guy who threw that original coat of paint on, eons ago. (Little known fact of life: That old adage about artists being their own worst critic can be equally applied to just about every skilled worker, anywhere.) And of course, everyone knows that any good interior designer never lets their client choose the same color scheme that they already had... the designer has to justify their sky-high invoice at the end of the day, after all! ("I've got it! Let's change everything from yellow to cyan! Trust me -- I promise it'll be fantastic!")
In addition, the developers who had spent countless hours implementing scads of features that are never used, have doubtless been pressuring those designers to help them justify their existence, as well. (All of us old-timers have seen the results of that quite a few times, in the form of the various feature reshuffles which have been thrust upon Microsoft Office users. "Hey -- what's this button? Is it a new feature?" "Huh? Oh... nah. I've used that feature a couple of times before. It's really not as useful as you might think, though...") The all-too-predictable results are, the new Gmail interface compresses and de-emphasizes features that most people use on a daily basis, expands (and surfaces) a few features that very few people care about or will ever use, alongside squeezing in those one or two actual new features... that last of which had in reality driven the entire venture in the first place.
To wit: much work was done, to accomplish little.
Fortunately, the 'correct' gender pronoun is easy because there in only two genders. Men & women. Now, some men & women don't want to live in the traditional gender roles. That's fine, they can dress however they like - but they are still men and women. The gender classification apply to what you look like naked. What anyone 'think' or 'feel' doesn't matter. Classification must work even for dead people who don't think.
Pronouns is still easy.
Google can do what they want with the UI to try and make it better, but I don't think it will ever compete with a full on dedicated mail client like Thunderbird of Geary. I find I can get most tasks done faster with a thick client than I can with the Gmail website.
Due to the removal of Labs, I no longer have an upcoming calendar events on the left side. I can open a today view on the right, but not just a list of upcoming events.
I asked about disabling some of the changes on the Google Product Forums, and the "official" members told me there was no way to change them and to "Please use the in-app 'Send feedback' link to submit your request/issue directly to Google. You will not receive a response from Google."
("You will not receive a response from Google" seems like it ought to be their new motto.)
However a heroic stranger happened along and developed a number of CSS hacks usable via Stylish that cleans up almost all the most annoying elements of the new UI! So i now share my good fortune with you!
CSS Fixes for new Google UI
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I don't see any noticeable difference on the web version. But, in the Android version on my phone, the program now collapses email threads into a single long concatenated message with portions hidden. It makes the replies in the thread, particularly the later ones, very hard to read.
Its different, so I'm sure the vast majority of /. hates it even if they haven't seen it. Some will say they access Gmail through Lynx so it doesn't impact them, and the rest will chide everyone else for not running their own mail server inside of a Faraday cage only accessible through a VPN based on the moon.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No Sir, I don't like it.
It would be even weirder to use *his* for Lauren than *their* - unless you know something I don't.