What happened to Gmail?

I have been using Gmail every since it first went public. I’ve always liked it for its simplicity, reliability and performance. When I read that the Gmail team had done some work to make their product even faster, I could not wait to get my hands on the new version. This morning, I was finally able to try it out and I was extremely disappointed. Firefox kept crashing, locking up, and the overall performance went down dramatically (in spite of disabling Firebug and turning the chat feature off.) I have read many such reports on other blogs, so I am wondering what the QA procedure is at Google. Maybe it’s time to put the “beta” back in Gmail, or roll back the previous version…

In the meantime, I’ll switch back to the good old Yahoo! Mail.

Update: Gmail is still in beta. For some reason, I thought they had passed that stage. My apologies for the misinformation.

Update: The Gmail developers kept a link to the older version (look at the links located at the top right of the page) Very wise decision indeed.

6 thoughts on “What happened to Gmail?

  1. Sam S

    I have had no troubles; I do however find yahoo mail to be far and away inferior to gmail.

    1) Gmail less ads
    2) Superior handling of attachments
    3) Awesome spam protection - virus pro seems good too
    4) The great interface

    yahoo seem by comparison to be chintzy and awkward

  2. Julien Lecomte Post author

    @Sam

    Maybe they haven’t moved you to the new version yet.

    I still manage to freeze the entire browser for about 10 seconds every time I close the tab that’s currently running Gmail. Every so often, this same action causes Firefox to crash. I cannot reproduce any of these problems with the older version of Gmail.

    Also, the interface is a bit more sluggish than the older version (especially switching to a folder I haven’t visited since the beginning of a session)

    If a Gmail developer happens to read this, I am using Firefox 2.0.0.9. I disabled Firebug and turned the chat feature off.

  3. George P.

    I too found the new version quite disappointing. I also take objection with Google hiding a product like GMail behind a Beta banner. It seems as if anyone can add a beta title these days and justify screw ups.

  4. Raj

    I experience the same issue with Gmail. Though I”m not sure if its Gmail or FireFox. FF seems buggy with recent releases. I have problem with many sites in FF. FF-2.0.0.10 seem to have come soon after 2.0.0.9 - I wonder why! Yet to try .10 version.

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  6. flippedup

    FF 2.0.0.11 under Ubuntu 7.10 Gnome 2.20.1 and it performs the same way using the new version of GMail. @Julien closing the GMail tab does cause FF to freeze for 5+ seconds. In this release, I think they’re trying to pull back less data by using JSON and have the client’s browser build everything. Every time GMail queries for new data, it seems to redisplay the starred and status images. It’s definitely slower than the older version but it comes packed with more features.

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