Programming in the State of 70% Drunkeness

Gmail’s dev team has just recently rewritten most part of the core javascripts for Gmail and was released to the public right away.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/code-changes-to-prepare-gmail-for.html

So recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that we’ll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with other browsers to follow). You won’t notice too many differences to start with, but we’re using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share components (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are some new keyboard shortcuts and the ability to bookmark specific messages and email searches.

The outcome is great and some of the stuff that they did really inspires me (should be to all developers out there)

This should go on to every developer’s best practices list:

We have also been fanatical about speed. Even on a fast Internet connection, it can take a second to request and render a new web page, and when you read a lot of mail, these seconds can accumulate to hours waiting for email to load. We’ve spent a lot of time profiling all parts of the application, shaving milliseconds off wherever we can, and figuring out workarounds for some pretty deep-rooted issues with the current browser implementations. Some of the most common actions should be faster now.

Aaron Boodman of Greasemonkey and Gears fame also wrote:

At Google, we dogfood all our products. That means, among other things, that we use Gmail all day for all our internal mail. I don’t know of any other company producing web mail that can claim that. It also means that we have really high standards for these products. 500ms latency is usually considered great for a web application, but for something you use all day, it just won’t cut it. Because of this, the Gmail team has been to hell and back several times over the course of this project, trying to shave milliseconds off frequent operations.

Personally, i’ve heard from more than one person complaining about how Gmail’s loading speed is getting worse and worse. To me, it was a nightmare if Gmail was left on for a long time and you come back to it, it was just SLOW. I noticed the facelift before i found this article on Ajaxian.com. How I realized was actually through Firebug. Here’s a screenshot.

Checkout the “FIX”

Firebug can make Gmail slow

If you’re using Windows or Linux

For the best Gmail performance, we suggest disabling Firebug for www.google.com by following these steps:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If you’d like to keep Firebug running, you may improve Gmail performance by following these steps:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the Console tab.
3. Select Options.
4. Uncheck Show XMLHttpRequests.
5. Click the Net tab.
6. Select Options.
7. Check Disable Network Monitoring.

If you’re using a Mac

Please note that if you’re using a Mac, you’ll continue to experience performance problems unless you disable Firebug for Gmail. To disable Firebug for www.google.com, please follow the steps below:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If disabling Firebug for Gmail doesn’t improve performance results, you may have to entirely disable Firebug.

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