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Google Businesses The Internet Upgrades

Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout 250

Posted by kdawson from the still-the-same-primary-colors dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "Google on Tuesday confirmed it is giving Gmail a new look. This blog post has screenshots of a new Gmail interface that has been made available to a limited number of users. They are calling it "Gmail 2.0" even if Google isn't. Google confirmed the update is underway at its new San Francisco office, just prior to a briefing on an unrelated upcoming Google announcement. A Google spokesperson said that the new look has been made available to about one percent of all Gmail users and is being rolled out the rest on an ongoing basis."
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Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout More

Google Begins "Gmail 2.0" Rollout

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  • 2.0? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sporkinum ( 655143 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:07AM (#21181923)
    I guess I didn't realize that gmail was past 1.0 yet. I thought it was still a beta.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Don't worry, it's only some bloggers calling it 2.0. Google says it is not called that.
    • The whole "Beta" thing that google and company do is really starting to piss me off. It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

      • Re:2.0? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Whiney Mac Fanboy ( 963289 ) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:57AM (#21182415) Homepage Journal
        I'm afraid google use the term 'beta' correctly. They just have higher standards than you.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by muszek ( 882567 )
          Yeah, but you can't really call something a beta when 110% of world's population is using it as a primary email service.

          • Re:2.0? (Score:4, Funny)

            by Spokehedz ( 599285 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:32AM (#21182857)
            Wow... 110% you say? that explains the email from 'unbornfetus33421@gmail.com' I keep getting.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by calebt3 ( 1098475 )
            Why not? If everybody on earth would suddenly start using some Linux distro that is currently in beta, it would still be in beta. Granted, it would likely get out of beta pretty quickly thanks to all the Linux devs coming from other projects, but for a time, it would still be a beta.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 )
        It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

        You prefer that users expect 1.0 to mean 'beta'?

        • Re:2.0? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by alexgieg ( 948359 ) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @09:13AM (#21183323) Homepage

          You prefer that users expect 1.0 to mean 'beta'?
          Thanks to Microsoft, I think most already do. Isn't it common nowadays for users in general, and those in TI in particular, to expect any new OS developed by them to only work correctly after its first service pack? I know I do. 2000 wasn't good. 2000 SP-1 (or more, I don't remember) made it good. XP wasn't good. XP SP-1 was. Vista isn't good. Vista SP-1 probably will be. And so on and so forth.

          Actually, even back in the days Microsoft used numbers to differentiate product versions, it was common sense that "x.0" versions weren't worth it. Those who knew advised users to prefer a previous version with a higher number after the dot, as by then it would be stable and actually working as expected...

          In short: whenever Google decides to remove the "beta" tag from Gmail, I doubt they're going to call it "Gmail 1.0". It wouldn't be good for business.

      • Re:2.0? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:19AM (#21182715)

        The whole "Beta" thing that google and company do is really starting to piss me off. It's getting regular users to expect "Beta" to mean "1.0" and when Beta turns out to actually mean Beta, they get all pissy.

        I lay the blame at the feet of open source developers who started this nonsense. Far too many open source utilities have had years of stable versions numbered <1.0. These apps are in permanent "beta" simply because the developers don't want take responsibility for a finished product. It ate your hard drive? Ooh, sorry. You gotta expect some bugs in a beta. We expect it to be finalized sometime before the heat death of the universe. But don't quote us on that.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Timex ( 11710 ) *

          It ate your hard drive? Ooh, sorry. You gotta expect some bugs in a beta.

          Uhh... No. If it ate my hard drive, it's alpha.

          I expect "beta" to work somewhat, though without the full functionality that the developer wants it to have. Sure, it may have bugs that cause it to crash sometimes (or often), but I the more violent, destructive sorts of repercussions, I relegate to alpha-level software.

          If you happen to be talking about disk defragmenting software on the other hand, that's something else entirely.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by philg8 ( 64645 )
        They're using the Microsoft numbering system. It's not out of beta until version 3.0 or 4.0. (Some of us could argue it never leaves beta...)

    • Re:2.0? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by alexgieg ( 948359 ) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @09:34AM (#21183621) Homepage

      I guess I didn't realize that gmail was past 1.0 yet. I thought it was still a beta.
      I'd call the new version even more beta-ish than the older.

      On the plus side:

      a) Clicking a message opens it almost instantly. This is a HUGE improvement.

      On the bad side, two very annoying problems:

      b) Scrolling up or down in the message list is much slower than the older version, either with the scroll bar or with the mouse wheel.

      c) The label-applying drop-down being now an HTML element makes scrolling it with the mouse wheel painful. The moment the I hit the end of the list, it start scrolling the whole page down. Previously, it'd hit the end of the labels list stop there.

      For me, 'a' isn't worth dealing with 'b' and 'c', so now I have a bookmark that opens https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1 [google.com] directly. UI 2 isn't polished enough yet. But things are probably going to improve. It's just a matter of time.

  • JavaScript back-end? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeks ( 68 ) * on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:09AM (#21181939)

    ...thanks to a JavaScript back-end rewrite...

    I highly doubt that GMail uses JavaScript on the back-end. In fact, it is pretty well known that GMail is written in Java and only uses JavaScript on the front-end.

  • Well, that explains it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bwintx ( 813768 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:16AM (#21181995) Homepage
    From TFA (first link):

    If there's a downside to Google's upgrade, it's that third-party extensions to Gmail may stop working.
    So now I know why my GMail notifier add-on to Firefox died in the last couple of days. Went with Google's own notifier applet as a substitute in the meantime, but would prefer the old way. We'll see how soon that becomes possible.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by hyades1 ( 1149581 )

      LifeHacker says the Firefox people are already working to get plug-ins and extensions functioning with the new system, and expect to have things harmonized in very short order.

      My bare-bones Thunderbird likes GMail's IMAP just fine, but I don't know about the bells and whistles some people need/use.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iswm ( 727826 )
      I was thinking the same thing... "That's weird, I haven't gotten any emails in a few days..." Then I saw this article, went to see if I had the new interface. Turns out I do. Turns out I also had 30 emails waiting for me.

  • Faster access due to pre-fetching and caching (Score:5, Informative)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:17AM (#21182003) Homepage
    Apparently, one of Google's goal in releasing this new version is to provide a new code framework that will help them to speed up Gmail's response time in a number of areas. One feature of note is that Gmail now pre-fetches and caches messages in the current view, so when you click on a message, it loads almost instantly. On my broadband connection, I see much improved response--clicking a message now displays it almost instantly--no lags or delays.

    -Jim
    http://gmailtips.com/ [gmailtips.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hansamurai ( 907719 )
      I can confirm that it is definitely a lot faster. It's really snappy now, besides that initial opening which still seems a little slow compared to most websites, though I don't use any webmail besides Gmail so I'm not sure if this is typical.

      The new version was turned on automatically for me, I had a link to the Older Version at top.

  • Not deploying with any rhyme or reason... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by willith ( 218835 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:19AM (#21182015) Homepage
    My wife, of all people, ended up getting this--she called me in yesterday and wanted to know "What the hell is wrong with [my] Gmail?" Among other things, it looks like they've further integrated the IM features (which we both hate) and made them far more difficult to disable. She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing. Fortunately, there is an "Older version" link in the upper right corner that reverts back.
    • You can always change her bookmark:

      New Version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2 [google.com]
      Old Version: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1 [google.com]

      Anyone here not have the links at the top that can verify if the top link lets them "access" the new UI without being in that 1%? Or did they mean the 1% of the community that had it turned on will default to ui=2 instead of ui=1?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Thrakamazog ( 794533 )

      She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing.
      Perhaps she should not be using a beta version then.

      • Re:Not deploying with any rhyme or reason... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by nschubach ( 922175 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:16AM (#21182679) Journal
        Unfortunately, Beta is the new "hip". (or the new Black if you prefer) Somewhere along the line it was decided that you are edgy and groundbreaking if you "get into beta." I actually had one of my friends tell me I wasn't a real gamer because I didn't get into a beta test. (Coincidentally, I am/was not a FilePlanet subscriber and these were the only people "accepted", so I didn't feel a huge loss by it since I didn't have to pay to bug test.)
    • Yeah, I was not a fan either ... you can't remove the chat pane, so far as I can tell (you can drop it below tags but that's it, in the older version you can blast it away completely), and if you chance to hover over it (even in its 'closed' state) you get a pop up showing you ... yourself. Gee, useful, I forgot who i was :P

      All the message headers get tabbed over a character or two to make space for the status of the sender - again, even if you have no desire to use chatting, and even in mailing list mess

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DanielJosphXhan ( 779185 )

      My wife, of all people, ended up getting this--she called me in yesterday and wanted to know "What the hell is wrong with [my] Gmail?" Among other things, it looks like they've further integrated the IM features (which we both hate) and made them far more difficult to disable. She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing.

      I say this with as much charity as I can muster, but how exactly does your wife exist on earth without becoming at least a little adapted to change? The user interface of her life is changing all the time; I'm pretty sure computers aren't that much different.

      Frankly, if my wife called me with a problem like that, I'd ask her to have a crack at figuring it out for herself. It's not a magic box. It's logic and layout. There's nothing difficult about it, in fact, I can name a hundred more difficult things I h

  • [whine]... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by UnanimousCoward ( 9841 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:24AM (#21182055) Homepage Journal
    ...how 'bout first enabling that promised IMAP interface so I can ditch the unreliable POP on my iPhone?[end-o-whine]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rich_r ( 655226 )
      They have!
      HTH
      HAND
      • [whine-again]I know they have...for some people. The conspiracy theorist in me says G is first rolling it out to non-intensive GMail users (like my buddy who uses .MAC and has been laughing at me daily), not people like moi[endowhine-again]

        • The conspiracy theorist in me says G is first rolling it out to non-intensive GMail users (like my buddy who uses .MAC and has been laughing at me daily), not people like moi[endowhine-again]

          The conspiracy theorist in you would be incorrect; I use GMail exclusively for my personal email (700 MB in use and counting) and I had IMAP right away (and works quite nicely with the iPhone). Go to the "Settings" area and look for the "IMAP/POP and Forwarding" option. You have to explicitly enable IMAP access for

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rufo ( 126104 ) *
            Same boat. I sign out, empty my cache and sign back into Gmail about once a day to see if they've enabled it and still no dice. It just says "Forwarding and POP" in settings, not "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" like people with IMAP enabled describe.

    • Re:[whine]... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gleng ( 537516 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:33AM (#21182147)
      IMAP seem to be only rolled out to people with English(US) language settings at the moment. To enable IMAP, I had to:

      1) Change the language setting from English(UK) to English(US).
      2) Go back to settings, and then into the newly available "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab.
      3) Enable IMAP.
      4) Configure my client (Thunderbird) and make a successful connection.
      5) Go back into the settings, and change the language back to English(UK). The "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab changes back to just "Forwarding and POP".
      6) Continue using my sweet, sweet, IMAP.

      This method is hit and miss it seems. But hopefully some people might be lucky.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
        I am using English (US) settings, and no sweet IMAP for me yet. I do currently have POP turned on, I wonder if that is holding me back?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gleng ( 537516 )
          I have POP turned on too, so I don't think it's related. Time to play the waiting game, it seems.

          Maybe it's worth switching the language settings about to see if it makes any difference?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yanos ( 633109 )
        Wow, that worked! I was in English(US), I changed to English(UK) and then switch back to US. Now I have the IMAP tab. Cool!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rk ( 6314 )

        I don't think they're done with the IMAP rollout yet. I've been set to US English since Christ was a corporal and I still just have "Forwarding and POP". I even tried just now switching to UK English, then switching back. No dice.

        Not a biggie for me, I doubt I'll use it. The web interface is fine for my needs.

      • Re:[whine]... (Score:4, Informative)

        by anticypher ( 48312 ) <anticypher.gmail@com> on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @12:33PM (#21186109) Homepage
        Gmail's IMAP is broken for any messages in a non-american 7-bit character set, which is why they only enable it for people who declare their default language as EN_US.

        I just tried one of my IMAP enabled accounts again, and accented characters (ISO-8859-1 and -14) either show up as a ?, are replaced by the 7 bit equivalent (é becomes i), or are missing. There is a lot of work to shoehorn real-world language support into the IMAP protocol. It's an area I've actively avoided, but could be why the rollout is only for people likely to receive only US-ASCII or CodePage=437.

        the AC
    • I'm in the same boat. I've checked every single day for the past week and still nothing (and I'm set to US English, too.)

      Now it's time to warn people about this interface change. My girlfriend's parents barely understand how to log in to the existing interface... if anything changes, they will probably assume it's a virus and we'll get a panicked phone call.
  • the ability to modify the appearance of labels on a per label basis. Would make it easier to sort at a glance.

  • What I REALLY want is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrZeebo ( 331403 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:43AM (#21182247) Homepage
    It's great that they're improving the interface, and being able to access mail stored on Google's servers via IMAP is a nice addition. But what I REALLY want is to be able to store my mail on MY server, and access it via Google's awesome interface. Really, just use Google as an IMAP client to my mail server.

    I know they offer to do that via POP, but I want the "live" copy of my mail to remain on my server, and for Google to access it via IMAP. I don't like the idea of all my mail being stored on someone else's server, especially when I'm not paying anything for it and therefore should have no real expectation of it still being there tomorrow.

    Google for domains seems at first glance to do this, but your mail is actually still stored on Google's servers.

    Has anyone ever heard of this sort of feature coming in the future?
    • But what I REALLY want is to be able to store my mail on MY server, and access it via Google's awesome interface. Really, just use Google as an IMAP client to my mail server.

      What about them enabling mail server capabilities on something like a Google Mini (search appliance)? Or selling a turnkey Google Apps Box? Having it on site would certainly speed corporate acceptance.

      -b.

    • Use offlineimap to synchronize [push] your mail to google's servers, then set your sender domain inside gmail to whatever your real domain is.
    • Hear Hear! I've been wanting for this for a long time.

      I've been using Gmail for about a year and a half now. Previous to that I was a commited pine user, and couldnt stand anything else, let alone webmail. I still cant stand pretty much any other webmail app, and that includes both the services like Yahoo and hotmail, as well as the various versions available to run on a LAMP system (and that includes the newer, supposedly 'gmail like' ajax ones such as RoundCube. But gmail has me hooked, and I'd be hard pr

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jalefkowit ( 101585 )

      Why would they do this? What's in it for Google?

      They DON'T WANT your data living on your server. They want it living on THEIR server. The whole point of Gmail is to funnel whole new categories of data into THEIR SERVERS.

      The attractive front end is just bait to get you to agree to dump your data into their servers. If they let you use your own server it would defeat the purpose of engineering the attractive front end in the first place.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MrZeebo ( 331403 )
        Allowing access to external mail accounts via IMAP doesn't actually prevent them from doing this (getting my data). They still have to process the mail data in order to display it within the Gmail interface -- there's nothing stopping them from storing the data on their servers and using it for whatever they use it for (i.e., ad targeting). As long as they're treating my IMAP server as the "live" copy, my experience is the same.

        In fact, they could even be open about this and call it "caching", and use the

  • But (Score:5, Funny)

    by witte ( 681163 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:44AM (#21182263)
    is it compatible with Comcast ?

  • is 2.0 automatically secure? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by astrokid ( 779104 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:53AM (#21182351)
    Ie: Can I stop changing the URL to "https" after logging into my account?

  • Just start there (Score:5, Informative)

    by chphilli ( 885315 ) <chphilli+slashdot@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:10AM (#21182595) Homepage Journal
    Just set your bookmark to https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] - you'll start & stay in SSL. I've been doing this for a really long time ( I can't remember when I even created the bookmarks I have in all my browsers to do exactly this. )

  • Works much better on the iPod touch (Score:3, Informative)

    by sjonke ( 457707 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:38AM (#21182927) Journal
    It works much better on my iPod touch. For one I automatically get mobile view instead of defaulting to (an extremely slow to load) full html view, and now there is a "basic html" option, which works a lot faster than how the full html view worked before. The full html view is no longer available, though.

  • Some changes I have noticed... (Score:4, Informative)

    by bgarland ( 10594 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @10:27AM (#21184305) Homepage
    Well, first of all, my initial thought was "WTF happened to my Gmail?" because this change occurred the same day that I installed OS X 10.5 (and the new Safari). Now that I know the changes were made on Gmail's end, it makes more sense.

    1) For a while yesterday, the new titlebar/tab of the main Gmail window said: Gmail - Inbox - username@gmail.com (where username is my account name). Now it just says "Gmail". That's right, it doesn't update anymore to say "Inbox (1)" when I get a new mail.

    2) Hovering over names in your message list gives a new style pop-up that shows the person's name, email address, and picture. Across the top of the pop-up are styled gradient buttons that say "Email", "Invite to Chat", and "More...". Clicking More will show options for "Recent Conversations" and "Show in Contact List: Auto, Always Show, Never Show, Blocked". Previously, hovering over names in the message list just showed you their email address. The new functionality seems similar to what the old version did when you hovered over your contact / chat list in the sidebar.

    3) Chat now works in Safari. There are new (?) options for the chat list, including "Size of chat list: tiny, small, medium, large" and "Show in chat list: Most popular, all". (This may not be new, I never used G Chat in a browser because it didn't work on Safari before).

    4) There are new actions to apply to messages. One is "Filter messages like these" the other is "mute". I'm not sure what mute does.

    5) As the linked article says, Contacts management is now vastly different. It actually still looks a bit unfinished (or maybe it's just Safari's rendering, but I doubt it).

  • still has SEARCH but no SORT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @11:23AM (#21185093) Homepage Journal
    And I still can't click on a column heading to sort by sender, date, size, etc. Search and labels are great, but they don't fulfill EVERY need. Why does gmail still lack such basic functionality that every other binary and web email client of the past decade has had?

    For example: say I've got a few hundred messages and I want to find the few that have large attachments--ZIP files, a bunch of pictures, whatever. How do I do this with Gmail? Should I tag message with large attachments in a special way? If that's your suggestion, I'd like to point out that that is STUPID for two reasons:
    1) the data is ALREADY THERE. Why should I manually tag messages? Aren't computers supposed to DO WORK FOR US?
    2) that requires me to know ahead of time what ALL my needs will EVER be. What if I've been collecting this mail for years and then suddenly think "I'd like to find all these messages." But oops, I don't have my TIME MACHINE, so I can't go back and tag them all.

    With anything else, it's just a click or two.

  • Didn't even know I had it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by superstick58 ( 809423 ) on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @03:31PM (#21188385)
    After seeing this article, I took a closer look at my GMail interface (the contacts part). I did notice I've been running the updated version this whole time! I didn't even realize it. It's pretty subtle if you just look at your inbox all day like I often do. The new contacts is kind of nice even though I haven't had much time to explore it. However, in just a few minutes of clicking things I did manage to break the interface running in Firefox. After clicking from Drafts to Contacts, the interface just got "stuck". I now can't go back to my inbox or any other subsection and my contacts aren't showing up. A complete refresh though fixed that. Anyway, I look forward to picking through the new tweaks to the interface.

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