GMAIL 2.0: THE NEW AVTAAR

A major upgrade to Gmail
is getting the thumbs down from users who complain that the new version
is extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their
browsers.

People have flooded discussion forums with complaints since Google began "upgrading" users about two weeks ago to the new version, popularly referred to in the blogosphere as Gmail 2.0.

Ironically,
Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager, is designed to
be faster and more stable. Gmail 2.0 is based on what a Google
spokesman calls "a major structural code change" upon which new
features will be launched in coming months.

"Most users should see a marked improvement in performance. We recommend using IE7 and Firefox 2 to take full advantage of Gmail's speedier interface," said spokesman Jason Freidenfelds via e-mail.

Asked
about the problems users are reporting, Freidenfelds didn't address the
complaints specifically but said that Google appreciates the feedback
it's getting. "The new code underlying Gmail should allow us to roll
out performance improvements more frequently," he said.

Users interviewed via e-mail for this article report a variety of performance problems with Gmail 2.0.

The
most common complaint is that it is generally very slow, with delays of
a minute or more when attempting to display the inbox upon logging on,
to record keystrokes when typing text and to respond to mouse clicks.
Often the tasks time out. Others report that Gmail 2.0 repeatedly
crashes or freezes their browsers, in particular Firefox.

If
these users switch to the "old" Gmail version, the problems go away.
However, these users say they have to switch manually every time they
log on, because Gmail 2.0 automatically became their default version
once they got upgraded to it.

When Google upgraded his account last week, Jim Sellers, a software programmer based in Ottawa, Canada, was eager to try Gmail 2.0's improved contacts manager, but his Firefox 2.0 browser kept crashing both on Windows 2000 and Mac OS X 10.4.

"These
problems were very disruptive. I spend at least 25 percent of my day
using my browser as one of my main working tools. To have it crash like
that made the new version of Gmail a non-option," said Sellers, an
otherwise satisfied Gmail user since June 2004.

As a workaround,
Sellers has bookmarked the URL for the "old" Gmail version. However,
others expressed worry that Google at some point will phase out access
to the "old" Gmail without having fully resolved problems.

Some
users interviewed also complained that Google didn't notify them that
they would be moved to Gmail 2.0, or give them an option to decline the
upgrade.

Others, on the other hand, trust Google will soon solve the issues. That's the case of Jack Freeman, a retiree in Oklahoma
who, for lack of broadband options in his area, has learned to live
with, and make the best of, his relatively slow dial-up connection.

For
example, he enjoys posting answers in Google discussion forums, and in
recent days has been addressing a lot of questions about the slowness
of Gmail 2.0. Freeman's solution to the delays has been to toggle
between the two versions of the service. "It is still my favorite
e-mail program," Freeman said.

Google is moving people progressively to Gmail 2.0, so some users have it and others don't.

Google
didn't immediately reply to a series of follow-up questions, so it's
not clear what percentage of people have access to the new version and
how many are experiencing problems with it. It's also unclear when
Google expects to have everyone on the new version and when the
performance problems be solved.

What's clear is that the problems
have unleashed a storm of complaints. A search, sorted by date, for
"Gmail slow" in the Gmail Help Discussion forum returns about 35 pages
of results related to problems with Gmail 2.0.

njoy!!