The New Gmail

It seems the Gmail team has quietly slipped in a minor upgrade to the revolutionary and still yet after more than 3 years, best web email system I’ve ever seen. I have to use Outlook at work and yearn for the day that it will properly thread replies as Gmail does, but I digress…

Anyway, is it just me, or is the slightly “improved” Gmail actually dumber? Here are some pet peeves I’ve aquired in the last week of using the new Gmail:

1. For one, the drop down menus (you know, for selecting an action on individual and/or selected email) are no longer real select lists; they’re instead some DHTML kind of thing that has a scroll bar that feels flimsy. When I use the scroll wheel on my mouse, the whole page scrolls. It’s just weird.
2. It crashes Firefox. Every. Time.
3. When navigating away from Gmail, it always asks me if I am sure because I may lose data. What? Just let me go already!
4. Dangit, I don’t want chat mixed with my email client! Stop turning that thing back on. When I log in for two seconds to check my email, I don’t want some long lost friend [I’ve been avoiding] starting up a chat with me.
5. This is sort of a meta-peeve. Since I dislike the new version so much, I clicked “Old Version” in the upper-right. But that setting isn’t saved from browser to browser from session to session. I keep having to click it to go back to the old version.

No doubt, Google will be removing the old version, but only if a majority of the users are happy with the new one. Let your hatred be known by switching to the old version with me.

On a upbeat note, I do like that my Gmail quota has doubled to nearly 5GB. Not that I will ever use that much – I just like knowing that I will never use more than like 15%. :-)