What have you done to Gmail, Google??

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Rants

Updated: See the end of the post for the apparent solution

I've written before that I'm having issues with using Gmail over IMAP with Entourage and judging from the comments I'm not the only one (can't link to the commentor as they didn't leave a URL!) and now I'm having issues with the regular GMail web interface as well.

Originally I thought it was because of a dodgy extension I was running that was causing GMail to hang every time I clicked on a label but as it's happened on 4 different machines now I don't think an extension is the issue. I'm getting really fed up of having to force quit and restart Firefox every time I initially log in and click on something.

Seeing as I don't use the keyboard shortcuts, when I noticed they'd added a "basic html" version I though "Great, I'll use that one" but, guess what happens. Yes, GMail crashes FireFox when I click the link. Not only that, when I do get the basic html version up, Google never remembers that's my preference so I have to go through the same rigmarole every time I fire up the website.

I've written before about how I like to keep my emails organised in a neat folder structure rather than dumping them in a free-for-all archive or keep them in my inbox and I'm really struggling to do this with GMail IMAP access - or just even the plain web interface.

The only alternative I can see (without changing my email address again is reverting back to Pop3 email which works, but it's a pain in the **** as I work on so many different computers and I want them to be sync'd.

People rave all the time about how great GMail is but I'm just finding it frustrating. Then when you factor in the privacy issues I wonder why I bother at all. Maybe I should have stuck with my 10 year old Hotmail account instead (although their interface leaves a lot to be desired and I don't think they support IMAP in a free account).

I'm not asking for much (I don't think at least), all I want to do is to be able to manage my emails in a sensible way.

I hate to say it, but you don't get this issue with Microsoft Exchange Server!

</end rant>

Update - Solution? Hopefully! It turns out that disabling the HTML validator extension in Firefox seems to have cured the problem (though I still get crashes in Camino and Safari). It seems to be the Ajax interface code that's causing the problem