Since they switched the the non-Android mobile view to this unusable joke (especially if you rely on tags/folders):<p><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile</a><p>I'm glad I can force my mobile Browser to use the HTML version instead, which lists all tags at once.<p><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html</a><p>Also you can force[1] your browser to display the normal version no matter what:<p><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser</a><p>Force non-feature complete touch-enabled iPhone view[2]:<p><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/</a><p>[Edit] current iPhone view<p><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en</a><p>[2] <a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/gmail-modes.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/gmail-modes.html</a>
I am glad this still exists, it's helped me out a lot while living and working in Africa for the past month. Sometimes I don't have access to a fast connection. That being said, a lot of other Google products are <i>awful</i> across slow links, for no particularly good reason. Google+ doesn't work at all. Even clicking the little bell in the top right of another Google page never loads. I get the feeling Google needs to do more testing of their products over low speed and high latency links.
Having redundancy in a web app like Gmail is just good practice in my opinion. Any Javascript reliant application should still work without Javascript, I haven't tested it, but I seriously doubt something like Asana would work with Javascript disabled nor really any other JS heavy application.<p>Some people often forget that not everybody has access to a fast Internet connection, as pointed out Africa is one of those nations, but even here in Australia there are people out in regional areas still on dial-up because satellite is too expensive and DSL is not an option because of the distances. Then you have countries like Libya, Iran and even parts of India too.<p>I do wonder if Gmail didn't build a HTML version out of necessity, if Gmail were built in 2014 or even back in 2009, would it have had a fully functional HTML version to boot or would it have been only partially functional?
I agree with Paul. A website that does not function without JS is a poor design choice. I have JS disabled by default and only whitelist specific domains.<p>If your website content doesn't load up, there's a good chance I'm not sticking around unless it's imperative.
Oh yes, I'm well aware of this version of Gmail. I left the military in October of last year and this is the version of Gmail I was forced to use on our piece of shit government computers running IE6 or whatever they had.
This is awesome. Not only really professional of them for doing this but it works so well.<p>It's quite disturbing how many labels I have, though.
This Chrome extension toggles between standard view and basic html — <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/basic-html-email-toggle/oocjbicmfkpndkahldljaebmjaimehkk" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/basic-html-email-t...</a>
When Gmail first came out, I remember having to use Firefox or IE6, both of which were much slower on my 100MHz desktop than Opera was. The basic HTML version was super nice.