New interface is SLOW

[erimess]

Well, I'll chime in on this one, simply because I'm one of the ones who doesn't like the new interface... and I find it interesting that someone says those of us who don't like it get ignored. Since I don't hang around much, I can't know how many posts there ever were or what got ignored. I can only know from my own experience that I got largely ignored as well.

Especially by Pfolson, who only wanted to have a hissy with me because I don't have 72 hours in a day. (At least I see I'm not the only one - you appear to find excuses for anyone who isn't accepting the new with open arms.)

I don't believe that anyone ever purposely makes something worse. However, I have seen entirely too many cases where the intentions might be good, but seem a lot geared towards certain people who happen to like something, and ignore those who don't like it. (And yes, I realize you can't cater to everyone, but does it occur to some of you that you're catering most to people who happen to hang around and are in the know about things??) And unfortunately I've also seen many cases where the vast majority hated a change and no one cared. (I just completely left another site for that very reason - they lost site of their long-time important members.) So while things are not intended to be worse, they can come out that way anyway.

I personally see nothing special about the new interface and never have. Granted, I pretty much only use it at work where I don't have it bookmarked (I don't have my own computer) and it just goes to the new. But there's definitely things I dislike. And things that some of you do like, such as keyboard shortcuts, have no meaning to me, so I can't possibly see that as an improvement if I don't use them.

Now... I just went into the old and all the stylesheets appear to be gone. I don't mean the list in preferences. That's there. I mean the stylesheets themselves are gone, as in, lots of text and absolutely no formatting, no lines, no nothing. It's very difficult to read. Anyone else experience this? This might be a temporary booboo (like temporary lack of access to where they're located) - please tell me they haven't been taken away.

[newcrest]

Originally Posted by erimess

Now... I just went into the old and all the stylesheets appear to be gone. I don't mean the list in preferences. That's there. I mean the stylesheets themselves are gone, as in, lots of text and absolutely no formatting, no lines, no nothing. It's very difficult to read. Anyone else experience this? This might be a temporary booboo (like temporary lack of access to where they're located) - please tell me they haven't been taken away.

Yes the same thing is happening for me. After about ten years of being a happy Fastmail user this is the first time I have needed this forum. The new interface is a huge step backwards and I can't understand why the great features that made Fastmail stand out in the past have been removed for this clunky new interface.

Also, why does it take so long to long on to the new interface even with folder sync turned off?

[erimess]

That's about the third post at least tonight from a total newbie to the forums, making comments about the new interface. (And I haven't read much.)

I just commented on another thread about my thoughts that the people with the "majority" opinion are the ones who hang around here and have the time to keep up with stuff. There may be many, many people out there who have opinions but do not happen to hang around here or the blogs, etc.

It's always going to be true that those who will be heard are the ones who hang around the most. (I used to hang around more, so I used to be heard more.) I was questioned why I didn't complain earlier, and come have my say a long time ago. Well... these new people who are posting.... why didn't they come have their say earlier? Perhaps there's a reason for that after all.

The one good thing I can say is that I don't seem to have this slowness issue. Or not that I've noticed. If I ran some test or other, I might find a difference, but I don't even know how to do that, and I'm not noticing anything. I would like to make note that I don't know if you can blame it on someone's old computer. Mine is coming up on eight years old, and I have the slowest DSL I could get to keep costs low. So something else is going on there.

At any rate, for the moment I'm stuck with the new if I want to be able to read anything. Did you just notice the disappearance of any "style"? I only saw this tonight - it was fine last night.

[newcrest]

Originally Posted by erimess

Did you just notice the disappearance of any "style"? I only saw this tonight - it was fine last night.

Yes, it was fine yesterday but when I logged on today it was just plain text.

[groanerton]

Originally Posted by newcrest

Yes, it was fine yesterday but when I logged on today it was just plain text.

same here... its down and now i have to use the abysmal new interface. i honestly can't imagine who designed this thing, its almost funny in its geocities/angelfire-esque tragedy.

[billfryer]

I for one signed up with FM a long time ago because it was fast. I was previously using Yahoo mail, which ran little faster than a regular postal service.

I liked FM because it was clean and efficient with none of the 3D stuff and over-engineered customer interface that slows up a lot of these systems.

I've read the posts saying FM say it's difficult to support the old interface and I'm tempted to say "yeah right!". They've supported it this far. In my experience these kind of situations are more about saving face.

If you've blown a whole load of money on developing a new interface and customers don't like it, it takes an awful lot of humility to turn round and admit defeat. Humility and business don't always go hand in hand.

I've also looked at the competition and there isn't much (Tuffmail, PolarisMail, etc).

I'm not a programmer but I do know about business. If anyone wants to develop a new system to rival FastMail please email bill@billfryer.com.

[rabarberski]

Originally Posted by billfryer

I'm not a programmer but I do know about business. If anyone wants to develop a new system to rival FastMail please email bill@billfryer.com.

Competition is good, and makes products better!
I assume even Fastmail was started out of frustration with existing products.
Let us know when there'll be beta invites.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by billfryer

...If you've blown a whole load of money on developing a new interface and customers don't like it, it takes an awful lot of humility to turn round and admit defeat....

But if customers do like it, do you turn around and admit defeat?

The new interface is much more efficient in many respects:
In the old interface, to file a message in a folder I had to look through a long list of folders in a drop-down menu. In the new interface I just type 2-3 letters from the folder's name. In the old interface I had to repeatedly scroll down drop-down menus to perform actions I need to perform on emails. In the new interface I could add custom buttons for actions I use more often than others and hide actions I never use. In the old interface, when I needed to search for an email, I haven't even bothered trying folder by folder to find out where I put it. I headed straight to Gmail (were I kept a copy of everything for this purpose.). Since cross-folder search was added to the new interface I hardly ever login to my Gmail account. With the old interface it happened several times that I lost a message after I spent time and effort composing it. With the new interface I lose at most a line or two (today I was disconnected during the composition of an email. When I reconnected the automatic backup waited for me in the Drafts folder with only a few words missing).

I don't see why FastMail should "turn round and admit defeat". They created a much better interface. They just haven't introduced as many variations on color schemes as were accumulated over the years for the old interface.The fact that some customers don't like the change doesn't mean that all customers or even most customers don't like it.

[groanerton]

Originally Posted by hadaso

But if customers do like it, do you turn around and admit defeat?

The new interface is much more efficient in many respects:
In the old interface, to file a message in a folder I had to look through a long list of folders in a drop-down menu. In the new interface I just type 2-3 letters from the folder's name. In the old interface I had to repeatedly scroll down drop-down menus to perform actions I need to perform on emails. In the new interface I could add custom buttons for actions I use more often than others and hide actions I never use. In the old interface, when I needed to search for an email, I haven't even bothered trying folder by folder to find out where I put it. I headed straight to Gmail (were I kept a copy of everything for this purpose.). Since cross-folder search was added to the new interface I hardly ever login to my Gmail account. With the old interface it happened several times that I lost a message after I spent time and effort composing it. With the new interface I lose at most a line or two (today I was disconnected during the composition of an email. When I reconnected the automatic backup waited for me in the Drafts folder with only a few words missing).

I don't see why FastMail should "turn round and admit defeat". They created a much better interface. They just haven't introduced as many variations on color schemes as were accumulated over the years for the old interface.The fact that some customers don't like the change doesn't mean that all customers or even most customers don't like it.

sounds to me like you lack the technical knowledge to understand what's happening. fastmail "supporting" the old interface is not very much work; they've acknowledged they won't be updating it, and nobody complained. "supporting" it at this point literally means leaving files plain alone, allowing their old php and scripts and html to run exactly as they did before. therefore, to "unsupport" it is actually MORE work than supporting it, and the fact that they are phasing it out is shameful.

i am a web developer and have other web developer friends who were with fastmail since 2002 (!). we are all in the process of leaving. seriously, the site looks atrocious, with barely a thought to how form and function should operate on the modern web. the javascript hovers are not accurately programmed and lag unacceptably. and so on. its just so disappointing, with so many UI developers out there, that FM couldn't have just hired one person to do an actual good job. instead, they went with what the backend db programmers thought would be best. and we are the ones to suffer from it. so, so sad.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by groanerton

... "supporting" it at this point literally means leaving files plain alone, allowing their old php and scripts and html to run exactly as they did before. therefore, to "unsupport" it is actually MORE work than supporting it, and the fact that they are phasing it out is shameful.

I don't think they have any php scripts there. It's all perl. And they cannot "support" it by just leaving it to run "as is" because any change in the database, internal network or whatever can break it. So to continue supporting it they would have to continually update the code, and that would be maintaining the code that they are replacing by new code that's supposedly more efficiently maintained. Of course they can just let the old scripts run. but after a few days it would not show you your mail any more.

[rabarberski]

Originally Posted by groanerton

its just so disappointing, with so many UI developers out there, that FM couldn't have just hired one person to do an actual good job. instead, they went with what the backend db programmers thought would be best.

sounds to me you don't know what you are talking about.
I don't expect you to keep up with the forum or history of fastmail, but if you did, you would realize what nonsense you just wrote.

[groanerton]

Originally Posted by hadaso

I don't think they have any php scripts there. It's all perl. And they cannot "support" it by just leaving it to run "as is" because any change in the database, internal network or whatever can break it. So to continue supporting it they would have to continually update the code, and that would be maintaining the code that they are replacing by new code that's supposedly more efficiently maintained. Of course they can just let the old scripts run. but after a few days it would not show you your mail any more.

thanks hadaso, good point, i am tired and put in PHP instead of perl. but either way, i think ditching the old interface is much more a matter of saving face and pushing us through rather than the minimal amount of work to maintain old, polished and debugged scripts...

today is the first day i've been forced to use the new interface and i'm just continually shocked at how poor and unresponsive it is (i've tested across browsers and platforms). sure, a few things work a little better, but the rest are slow or are just unintuitive. so sad. i hate google's politics, but i think i'm just gonna have to switch there, unless this fabled AJAX interface materializes soon.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by groanerton

... the minimal amount of work to maintain old, polished and debugged scripts...

Only IIRC their position was that it's quite a lot of work to maintain the very old and overly patched up scripts with way to many things hard coded directly into it, making a lot of maintenance work into reprogramming (and then debugging). They also said that running the old interface requires things like an older kernel, or older Apache or other elements of their backend, so it's a nightmare for them to support it.

And what I find ironic is that the current wave of complaints about the new interface is that they created a separate url for the old interface so they can keep it on life support a bit longer while still continuing development of their service. They could have just closed the old interface (they did say a couple of years ago that it would be closed in a few months. They kept it longer than what they promised, and they are still keeping it alive, only with a separate entrance and a new promise that eventually it would be closed. Are they going to close it in a few months? Nobody knows. They didn't close it so far, despite promising to do so. I guess that they just cannot make a commitment to keep it alive for long because it would limit the development of the main system. They may keep it alive much longer if they don't encounter incompatibilities that are too hard to resolve, but they need to be able to cut it off if they come to a point where a decision has to be made in favor of a new development that's not compatible with the old interface or that requires way too much work to make it compatible, or that requires making a compromise that's not acceptable for them.)

[Mystakill]

Originally Posted by the bishop

Maybe this new Ajax thing that has been hinted around will show up in the next few years, and maybe it'll be a step up.

FWIW, FM is already using AJAX in the interface, MooTools, specifically. It's important to note that the performance of each of the major AJAX frameworks varies between different browsers, as well as between different hardware and operating systems. See this somewhat dated page for some comparisons and details, although each of the frameworks has likely been updated since it was written. Then try Slickspeed on your own system to see which framework runs best on your hardware/OS/browser combination (jQuery 1.4.2 and MooTools 1.2 come out on top on my office system running IE7, with 289 and 313, respectively).

AJAX alone will not improve anything. The aforemetioned factors, as well as *how* and *which pieces* of the framework(s) is(are) used will all affect each individuals' experience.

[rabarberski]

Originally Posted by Mystakill

FWIW, FM is already using AJAX in the interface, MooTools, specifically.

Hmm, I disagree.

AJAX is a 'fuzzy' word, and hence it is dangerous to use to base opinions upon. But, for what it is worth, according to wikipedia, there are two meanings for Ajax: (a) a technique to provide dynamic websites, and (b) a framework to provide Ajax support. (talk about recursion )

According to (b) FM indeed uses Ajax as you say. However, using an Ajax framework but not using the key Ajax feature (namely: providing dynamic websites), does not make a website 'Ajax'.

FM is not a 'dynamic' website. It requires a reload of the complete page to perform an action. For example, if you are viewing a message and you go to the next message, the complete page will be reloaded.
A dynamic website can send http requests in the background (based on actions performed by the user, or some periodic function) and update the relevant part of the page. For example, if a new mail would come in, a dynamic website would be able to update the list of messages without reloading the page. It just 'pops up' like it would in an email client. And only limited data would be exchanged, namely the subject of the message, sender etc, but not the fastmail navigation menu on the leftetc.

Gmail is a good example of a dynamic website. When you browse your messages, the complete page is not reloaded. And new messages appear instantly.

So, saying FM uses/provides/supports Ajax might be a bit overly optimistic IMHO.