20120510

Buggers Must Die

It is somewhat pathetic to criticise Google, a company which always strives to do what's best for us simple people — for free!
But.
I think they've just crossed the line with the “New Gmail Look”.
BTW, I hope you understand the irony of the first line: I really don't think I must feel obliged for their “free” email service — however good and accessible it is; quite the contrary, I feel I'm contributing to Google an irreplaceable and precious source of real-time information — the stuff the most world's (and certainly Google's) money comes from.
Personal opinions and tastes aside, the New Gmail Look is effectively incompatible with Mozilla Firefox — I know nothing of its compatibility with the new “good” Internet Explorer, unfortunately — and is clearly (cleverly) targeted for Google Chrome. To be clear, Gmail is functional in FF, but its CPU consumption there makes the combination unusable.
This is not something new or unexpected, both FF and Gmail have undergone development with this problem known — there are discussions, bug reports and blog posts like this one all over the internets — and I've been hoping a solution will be found before the New Look would become the only look, but alas, ah-ah, nope. At this moment, I have my peaceful internet existence violated and I feel forced to use the Chrome: Safari is also okay wrt Gmail, but it hasn't got nearly as much plugins as Chrome or especially Firefox have, so not much choice for a single-browser setup.

I don't think it's a fact to be taken lightly. I see something much worse than Microsoft coming, and I personally will now always try not to use Google products as the first option. Luckily, most alternatives to Google products actually outperform the latter.

Erm, yes, this blog will also be moved to a different provider in the nearest future.

p.s. Unrelated, kudos to Apple for making the choice of English flavour finally available system-wide. Alleluia!

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