Atma Xplorer

Xploring Games, Computing, Photography

Gmail 2.0

After the release of Gmail’s IMAP support, the free email service began rolling out Gmail 2.0 for its users. The change wasn’t global (I think it’s per area) and the change for my email account just arrived now. Check out my screenshot here.

If you notice that your gmail’s URL is no longer a set of long gibberish to:

http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox
or if you see a link to an “older version” at the top of the page, that means you can now enjoy the new features. What features are new in Gmail 2.0?

  • Faster loading from a rewritten Javascript backend
  • Mail prefetching
  • A new contact manager
  • More options for gTalk
  • A bit of GUI tweaks and improvements

Changes within Google aren’t for eyecandy only. Load times are quite faster especially since messages are prefetched when Gmail loads so wait when loading a message is almost non-existent. Because of the URL changes, you can now use the back button of your browser and bookmark different areas of your gmail. The messages are prefetched when Gmail loads so you don’t have to wait too much until a message is displayed.

What sold me was the new contact manager. It’s much more intuitive than the previous version with better options to manage your contacts with the ability to add addresses from other IM networks. Contacts can be exported in vCard format. If you want to see the new contact manager and you don’t have the new version of Gmail, don’t worry. It’s a separate application that can be found here.

Note that most Firefox plugins that formerly work flawlesly with Gmail doesn’t work with the new version. Check for updates or alternatives if you want to keep using them.

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Comments ( 4 )

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  1. jane Jane November 30, 2007 Reply

    “New Gmail” has frozen up on me quite a few times (once, maybe twice, per day) and I’ve had to crash Firefox as a result. I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else? It happens on both my laptop and desktop so it’s not just the machine I’m using… I hate hitting that “Older version” link but I can’t spend my day crashing and restoring my browser…

  2. atmaxplorer sylv3rblade November 30, 2007 Reply

    It’s due to the heavier AJAX interface. Though I’ve yet to experience something as bad as yours, I’ll put the blame on google’s new scripts and theres no word if there will be an update on the system’s reliability or not.

    If you hate the old version, why not use a desktop client like Thunderbird. Netvibes offers an online solution but it’s a 50/50 thing. The service always gets my logins mixed up.

  3. jane Jane December 1, 2007 Reply

    I like the old version just fine, but I want to use the new version without it crashing 🙂 I hope they update it to combat some of the problems, as I think Gmail is fantastic… until then, I’m going to be careful to save all of my online work before clicking Gmail links…

  4. atmaxplorer sylv3rblade December 1, 2007 Reply

    Hmm.. you can always contact the google team about the experience. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help. Come to think of it my browser just crashed on gmail while opening contacts.

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