Sunday, May 20, 2012

Another "New Gmail" Bug?

Sometimes a new user interface grows on me over time -- at first I think it's ugly and dysfunctional, but later I admit that it's actually more intuitive and has improved my user experience.

So far, no signs of that happening with "New Gmail." It's still ugly, and new annoyances continue to pop up. Lately (only lately, which is why I think it's linked to "New Gmail"), when I start to type in an email address or contact list name for which there are quite a few possible options, "New Gmail" freezes. About half the time it regains its footing after a few seconds. The other half of the time, it never does and I eventually get one of those Chrome browser messages asking me if I want to kill the non-responsive page.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" can be taken too far -- new stuff comes along that users just don't want to do without, etc. -- but in my opinion the previous version of Gmail wasn't broken in any respect. It worked great. It looked great. "New Gmail" is ugly and doesn't work right. Why, Google?

On the plus side, the Chrome browser now lets the user set to automatically invoke Gmail instead of defaulting to a desktop email client when clicking an email link on the web. That's nice!


Enhanced by Zemanta