Gmail's Speed Is Fantastic! Yeah, on Occasion….

Do you remember the much advertised speed that the new version of Gmail was said to be capable of unleashing into our unsuspecting midst? Flash! Thunder! Lightning! Actually something more in the terms of… Bogus! The pre-fetching of emails is there and is a very useful option if you don't mind the prolonged waiting that you have to endure before you are able to see the inbox page.

On the same note, it seems that Gmail has stepped to the next level: it now needs specific system requirements to be mentioned as it runs way too slow on some machines, on a forum a user complained that his Duron 1.6 Ghz linux box with 512 RAM can't decently manage opening and working with the mail service from Google. Granted that it is really not a top-notch system, it is ultimately weird for a mail client to have system requirements! And I'll keep saying that, come what may.

Ok, the opening a mail in the inbox display - or trashing the mail, or flagging it as spam - is now in the impressive realms of "instant" but it's not supposed to speed some things up and slow others down or at least that's not what the ads said.

Another thing that was nerfed is the auto completion in the field where the receiver's address is supposed to be written. It now catches on a lot slower than before in the new 2.0 version of Gmail, Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com noticed. The task of writing the address "has a considerable delay because the auto-completion takes much longer to load during the initial start-up of Gmail. […] entering the name will now not result in any auto-completion at all, unless you constantly type something in the address field until it finished loading the auto-completion data (apparently). So if your friend's name is "Fred" you'll now end up typing "Fred", then delete the "d", then type it again, and so on until the auto-completion is triggered."

Overall users consider the new Gmail an improvement from the old one, but only in some fields. The drawbacks mentioned before are some of the ones that have made people all over the world think that it is a slight improvement. And I underline. Slight.