Issues with Google GMail’s Basic HTML Interface

After years of using Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail (and USA.Net mail in the real early days of the Internet), POP/SMTP based mail came as a huge relief. Bad connectivity meant with webmail, it took 5 minutes to just reach the screen where I could check the new mails. Writing a mail was worse as it required more user action in a web browser that was technically receiving bits and bytes of data in patches.

POP based mail meant, I could write E-Mails at leisure. Sending 10 mails was as easy as pressing a button and hoping for the dialup connection to survive the data transfer. If I was lucky, downloading and uploading of my daily routine mails took 2 minutes in a mail client. Webmail looked crap after that.

Google changed it all with GMail. It showed the world how webmail should work. Instead of slow loading pages and big advertisements, it runs like a mini application in a web browser. And after initial loading of the interface, everything works like charm. Conversations as always are a pleasure to use…

However, use of advanced technologies meant, browser support was minimal. Google constantly tried and kept adding browsers but failed to satisfy all the users. This led to GMail team deciding to launch a HTML only version of the webmail interface. And after using it for some days, I think Google has indeed done a good job. Considering the service is still in Beta, better things are expected in the future.

There are however some things, which do not work nicely in the HTML only interface of the Google’s GMail service. First and foremost, Google takes Opera Browser user to the HTML interface directly instead of the original version. Opera’s compatible with GMail version is still in beta so it is expected to be fixed in the coming days. For current users of Opera, the following path comes handy to access the original GMail interface in Opera:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser

Google claims that their bare interface, which uses plain HTML, is compatible with almost every browser. This actually can come quite handy in trivial situations as I found out some months ago when I was stuck in a cybercafé with Internet Explorer 5. Though, regular users of GMail on these ancient browsers would dislike the lack of certain functionalities.

I particular dislike the absence of any ‘select all’ button for the conversations. This would of course need JavaScript, which might be missing from some real old browsers. In addition, I of course lack the delete mail button from the Inbox view (this issue is common to both the interfaces). Google has provided this functionality from a drop down which requires me to now take three steps to delete one mail.

Google also talks about other functionalities currently disabled in the HTML only interface. Filter creation, Spell Checker, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Mail address auto complete are missing. What really upsets me is that Google also has for now disabled manipulating of Settings of the GMail in the HTML version.

Hopefully, Google would be taking care of these issues before it decides to go public with GMail.