(no subject)

Tried gmail's new look, it sucks monstrously, am grumpy that they will roll it out whether I want it or not because there's no real alternative to gmail. Will need a script to make it suck less, just like google reader.

On top of all the wasted space-- and this was using "compact" on a 26 inch display, "comfortable" is like a sprawling suburban wasteland, with buttons and commands far from anywhere I actually need to be, even on my massive screen-- many of the choices are just ugly. Like when I reread chats (which I do a lot), there are icons and the space where the icons go but may not be, meaning that I've got 1.5 inches or so of empty white space where I could be putting words instead. Meaning I had to scroll through a narrower column of words for no perceptible reason. More space for ads? I dunno.

I managed to remove the contact thing (the "people widget") that went on the right side of emails/chats/whatever, because many of my friends use pictures of themselves for icons so it was like they're watching me read stuff. Those of you who share my discomfort around having pictures/inanimate objects watch them will understand. Those of you who don't-- just trust me, it's creepy. Even though the icon doesn't float perpetually on the right side of my screen, the space devoted to them is still there in the chat with no way to get rid of it.

Also, in old gmail when you scrolled into an email or archive, the top bar scrolled off-screen except for the command bar. Now the entire top bar stays in place.

It's annoying on my 26", it sucks on my 13" Mac, and on my netbook? There's more space taken up by the frames, ads, and white space than by the stuff I'm actually looking at.

Buttons float in a vast sea of nothingness, making it even more wasteful. They also don't shrink if you choose compact over comfortable or cozy, which means you can't tighten up the layout in any way that really matters, but you can fit more emails on-screen. Which... is an improvement, I guess?

In fact, there's just a lot of SPACE that doesn't do anything. Lifehacker is touting it as "less cluttered" but the only thing that made gmail look cluttered were the ads, and it's not like they made those less obtrusive. No, they just took information out from under your nose and forced you to scroll for things. If you google "gmail new look" you'll get a hit for Techcrunch with: "Gmail's New Look Goes Live: More Whitespace For Everyone" but if you follow the link, it's gone, even if you do a search on Techcrunch. Instead they have the sycophantic "Google Cleans Up Gmail With New Design And Better Search." Which makes me suspect that Google has some kind of mafia out there threatening tech sites that don't like the new look. Reddit knows what's up.

I anxiously await a script that will make things even tighter than they are in "compact."

It is also sloooooooooow. The Slowskys would love gmail. Loading anything takes about 5 seconds longer than it used to, and the initial switch froze my browser for 20 seconds. If I wasn't playing in another window, I may have force-quit it.

About the only thing that doesn't suck is that I now have an individual scroll bar for chats. Which, of all my issues with gmail, was pretty far down the list of things I'd fix.

This post brought to you by gmail's feedback, which only allowed 300 characters. It's not nearly enough to cover the amount of suck entailed in new gmail. Actually I sent them two things of feedback because they wanted to know why I was reverting, too. So I gave them 800 characters worth of IT'S UGLY AND SUCKS AND IS SLOW. Which is still not enough to contain the suck.