New iGoogle Gmail Gadget
I honestly believe that if there is any product of Google’s that is so unpolished and so under-featured that it is iGoogle’s new Gmail Gadget. I was a beta test for three months. I lived with the following things for three months.
No Links in Emails
The iGoogle gadget seems to be forgetting something pretty import in email: links. It has also sorts of other formatting options for incoming emails but totally forgets that a huge chunk of email is sharing links.
No Links in Message
Where’s Reply?
The reply button is apparently on the bottom of the gadget when you open an email. Rather than having it at the top and at the bottom of emails like in normal gmail, someone thought it would be fine to have people scroll on long emails.
Reply is at the bottom
Once the >’s were gone, I never missed them
Since google doesn’t normally send anything in plain text but rather in rich text, the iGoogle reply editor box can’t do anything but plain text. So, your quoted text which would normally be indented via blockquote is now prefixed a (or more) greater (>) than signs.
No Richtext support in Replies
Oh, the gain of two seconds!
The iGoogle gmail gadget doesn’t open your email when you click on it but rather gives you great half features stated above. While it does take (far) less time to load, maybe in the time of 3 to 6 seconds (but then YSlow says it takes 1.3 seconds to load Gmail Inbox), it doesn’t mean it’s worth the features being broken. It really be fixed with minimal effort. Extend the functionality.
Gmail is excellent and amazing but iGoogle’s Gmail gadget is totally wasteful and too impaired to actually be useful as previewer. Please, Google, fix your pants.
Agreed.
Tried it once and found it woefully inadequate as to others.
But Google can’t be everything to everyone, I guess.
Still, it’s attitude in trying to be may be admirable; just lacks a little grace.
Since I wrote the original post, it has become decent. It has link support and I think that blockquotes don’t go crazy anymore. Nevertheless, they could still make it much more polished with minimal effort.