Google recently rolled out a new version of Gmail, with some added features and enhancements. Ever since I saw screenshots of the new version, I’ve been waiting to try it out. Today, I was in for a surprise - my Gmail account was upgraded to the new version.
Here’s all that I noticed:
Comparatively slower
True, this version of Gmail with ‘optimised’ Javascript takes more time to load than the previous version. May be it’s due to the prefetching of email messages. All emails are ‘downloaded’ when Gmail loads, and this is taking up time.
I was looking for an option under the ‘Settings’ page to turn off this prefetching feature, but I think it is not possible to disable it at the moment.
Though the Gmail interface takes time to load, the loading of messages after the interface has loaded is very very quick, since they’ve been prefetched.
New Contact Manager
I’ve no complaints on this one though.
This new version of Gmail has a new and improved contacts manager that has some good features. Inline searching is there for you to search and locate info on your contacts quickly
If you want to add a new contact, you can add a lot of details about that person now, thanks to the improvements. You can store his multiple IM IDs, and city, zip, etc. all in separate fields.
And another improvement is that when you place your pointer over a contact in your message, a hover Pop up all details related to him, not just his avatar (like it was in the older version).
Gmail Chat - Good Improvements
There are a little, welcome improvements in the inbuilt chat client though, like for example, you can adjust the size of the chat box in a few clicks. Earlier, Gmail chat had a fixed size and you could only enable/disable it.
Gmail Chat can list people with whom you chat frequently. Just click the ‘Most Popular’ Option.
Mystery Mute Option
Noticed this in the ‘More Actions’ list. Couldn’t get what that was for. Ionut explains here that you use the ‘mute’ option to archive incoming messages directly.
Final Thoughts
No new skins, no folders, nothing much. I have switched to the older version at this point of time, since the newer one is a bit bulky and slow-loading. May be I’ll switch back.
But there’s a good news. Google has reportedly released an API for Gmail + Greasemonkey, and developers can easily add custom stuff to Gmail with scripting easily. May be that’ll bring a lot of things we’ve been asking for.
Has your account been upgraded to Gmail 2.0? What are your thoughts?
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