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Gmail Faster? Are You Sure?

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster

– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:

One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.

Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?

Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).

Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.

Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar. smile_omg

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Failed SP1 Update: Vista Still Sucks

Pardon my French.. it’s not exactly my style, especially not in the title, but enough is enough. I’ve long given up detailing Vista’s countless failures, but somehow, unconsciously I still hoped things would get better after installing SP1.

Not that I could get it – I was one of the “few” who had an offending Intel graphics chip in my HP PC, so I could not get it for a while. Then today it showed up on Windows Update, so off I went to a spare laptop (XP) since I knew the update would take about an hour or so.

Checking it an hour later:

Service Pack did not install. Reverting Changes. Do not turn off your computer.

WTF? So now it’s gonna spend another hour, a total cost of two hours to get back to where I was in the first place? And they wonder (?) why everyone says Vista Sucks.

P.S. Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.