And what functionality does it provide for that tons of javascript? I am asking honestly because most of the magic of gmail (which I love) is on the server side. The functionality that it has on the client side is trivial and in some cases atrocious. In these days it cannot even resize the compose box. The power of it's search bar should require trivial amount of client side code, so should the auto save. The only thing that should take up memory is client side caching of inbox which is primarily text.
What I'm missing here I'm honestly totally confused.
(Key point: Gmail uses over 100MB where FastMail uses 10MB. Careful engineering helps a lot.)
Gmail provides a lot more functionality with that JavaScript than you may think. There’s a fair bit of magic that goes into making an email client work as you want it to.
That being said: most web apps are surprisingly inefficient in their memory usage (I find it surprising, anyway), and Gmail is no exception. I last used Gmail a bit over a year ago on Firefox, and it tended to start at about 60MB of explicit allocations, and work its way up to about 110MB. (Chrome being generally less memory-efficient than Firefox at present, I understand that figure to generally be two or three times as much.)
But a good email client doesn’t need to be like that; compare FastMail (which company I work for, but this aspect of the design and awareness of memory consumption happened long before I joined): the current explicit allocations on my two FastMail sessions are: 10MB for my work account (mail, open for several days and used plenty), and 27MB for my personal account (mail has been open for a few days and used plenty, and then I just opened calendar, contacts, notes, files and settings, so that all the code for all of them is loaded and all their views initialised, and let it settle down from 53MB to 27MB).
A lot of these things come down to having people care about performance (time, memory or whatever axis you like). Having a large team often makes it harder to get right too.
Almost all news sites, even many blogs and should-be-very-bland web pages use more memory than FastMail.
That's what I believe too. Thing's are always harder to implement than you believe at first as a developer I know that. But even than the only explanation I can think of gmail's heaviness is not caring. In some ways it's even worse than a blog or news site which is often image heavy, required or not than can at least use up a lot of memory. Gmail on the other hand is not and it's something that is essentially meant to be opened for hours, gives a simple interface that suggests it would be light whereas taking up more memory than some bloated desktop client.
I would use FastMail's web interface full time if I could but I have different accounts on different providers and if I want to use them with a single UI, I have to use a regular desktop client.
Can you please convert your web interface into a generic mail user agent which works with all imap and smtp servers? This would be a much nicer solution than redirecting or fetching mails into a single account and imho your web interface feels snappier than MailMate on macOS and eMClient on Windows.
What I'm missing here I'm honestly totally confused.