Quote:
Originally Posted by truthseeker
Thanks- you are so right about Google being inscrutable. The only thing re: Fastmail is they will change the UI and I will have a new learning curve.
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Well, if you're primarily using actual mail clients, the interface doesn't really matter all that much anyway.... The vast majority of the concerns raised by long-time Fastmail users were more about the webmail interface, not so much the
administrative interface, and frankly I think for most novice users the new administrative interface is significantly more user-friendly anyway..... even for webmail, it's mostly the "power users" who have concerns about it being retired, for various reasons.
With all of the hue and cry over the "classic" interface being retired, it's also important to understand the entire timeline here... FastMail doesn't change the UI all that often — it's happened
once in the decade or so that I've been a FastMail user. I think there was one other major interface change before that, back around 2002 or so.
What you're seeing happening right now is really just the end of a
transitional thing.... What a lot of folks are calling the "new" interface was actually first introduced back in 2012, and that UI has remained basically the same since then, with of course the usual iterative improvements.
However, when FastMail
debuted the new UI five years ago, instead of simply forcing everybody over onto it, they kept the "classic" UI in place. So in other words, for the past five years, there have been two completely different web UIs for accessing FastMail — the "classic" interface for those users who preferred that and either couldn't or didn't want to move over to the new one, and the "new" interface which is really what the vast majority of current FastMail users are on (really, I'd bet good money that most users who have signed up for FastMail in the past five years probably don't know the "classic" interface even exists).
While FastMail hasn't released any specific numbers, several folks from the company have repeatedly said that only a small number of FastMail users are still on the "classic" interface — as of about two years ago they declared that
"the vast majority of users have moved to using it", so I think it's also fair to say that what you're seeing expressed in these forums is coming from that vocal minority of long-time power users. I started as a paying FastMail customer long before the new interface was even a gleam in the company's eye, but happily transitioned to the new UI pretty much as soon as it became available in 2012 as I generally preferred it. That said, however, I'm not primarily a webmail user — I also use Apple Mail on macOS and iOS almost exclusively to access my mail, only falling back to webmail when I'm in a situation where I'm on somebody else's computer and don't feel like pecking out a long reply on my iPhone.
To be clear, I don't want to make light of the concerns of those who prefer the classic interface. Many of their concerns are certainly valid from their perspective, and we're talking about webmail users who have grown accustomed to using the same UI over the course of a decade or more. Further, to be fair, FastMail
did suggest that the classic interface would be retained in perpetuity and then more recently decided to discontinue it. However, it's still important to keep it in the proper perspective, especially from the point of view of potential new users... we're talking about a five year process during which
both interfaces were available, followed by six months' notice that classic will be going away. I don't think it's realistic for anybody new to FastMail to be concerned that there's going to be another big UI change any time soon.
Frankly, with the speed at which technology moves, I'm of the mind that it's unrealistic to expect a company to continue to maintain a 10+ year old user interface. While I totally sympathize with those users who feel that FastMail broke its promise in this case, I also think that FastMail made some very naive promises back in the day, and I'm certainly hoping the company has learned from its mistakes going forward.