Introducing the new compose in Gmail
I hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but...<p>Whatever blogspot theme Google uses for this blog is just god awful (oh, I see, this is it: <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmail-blog-has.html" rel="nofollow">http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gm...</a>), and I swear it gets worse every time I view a post there.<p>To wit:<p>When I load the page I see the orange "loading" gears. Then that sliiiiides up to reveal the content. Really? Can they really not innovate here? This is a company that spends massive amounts of resources to get their homepage to load as quickly as possible. Heck, they even penalize companies in their index with slow loading times. And yet they purposefully add loading animations and transitions which add <i>at least</i> a second to page load, and probably more as far as time it takes me to engage in the content.<p>Also, every time I reload the page I see something different. Sometimes there is text in the black menu bar. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes there is an "extra" screen that slides up after the orange loading gears, sometimes not. Sometimes the sidebar navigation is there, sometimes not. Try refresh a few times yourself and you'll see.<p>Also, I love the five-second delay for the document URL update when you navigate via the sidebar.<p>All of these fancy, look-we're-using-ajax, gee-whiz-its-a-single-page-app features -- just for a simple blog post. Talk about complicating a simple problem!<p>Again, apologies for the rant but I couldn't even concentrate on what the blog post was saying because I was so distracted by this garbage.