Google Incorporated's major upgrade to Gmail is getting complaints from some users: the new version is extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers. The search giant began "upgrading" some of its users about two weeks ago to the new version, which, ironically, is designed to be faster and more stable. Users report delays of a minute or more when attempting to display the inbox upon logging on, to record keystrokes when typing text and to respond to mouse clicks. Often the tasks time out. Others say their browsers repeatedly crash or freeze, particularly in Firefox.
Switching to the "old" Gmail version makes the problems go away but this must be done manually every time, because the new version becomes the default one after the "upgrade". A work-around is to bookmark the URL for the "old" Gmail version. Users noted that Google didn't notify them that they would be moved to "Gmail 2.0" or give them an option to decline the upgrade. The percentage of people that have access to the new version is unclear (Google is moving users over to the new service progressively), nor is the number of users experiencing problems with it. A search for "Gmail slow" in the Gmail Help Discussion forum returns about 35 pages of results related to problems with the new version.
News source: ComputerWorld
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