I find it funny that Page complained about Gmail taking 600 milliseconds to load back when it was created. It probably takes longer than that these days unless you have a really fast connection.
If they had to check the server logs wouldn't they be referring to something more related to generating the html? This would remain the lowest response even on the fastest possible connection.
At the time, the server was probably about 30 feet away, so network latency wasn't a big issue :)
The article gets the timeline wrong though. This anecdote happened very early in the development of gmail -- it was rewritten several times between then and launch.
Yeah, but Gmail's inbox view is paginated. I don't think the number of conversations shown on a single page has changed since then. Maybe the conversations themselves have gotten longer?
I'm sure Google's engineers could get the page load time down if it was a priority. I think at this point everyone is so invested in Gmail they just aren't that worried about losing users because of slower UI load times.
I would imagine this is due to user behavior. How often do you refresh a gmail tab? I leave mine open for days, so having it load the entire app slowly isn't an issue. What is important is updating in realtime when a new email comes in and opening those almost instantly when I select them. If that is the norm, then initial page loads aren't nearly as important.
Hmm, perhaps I'm atypical. I generally don't leave my email open and respond in real time. I tend to do it in batches, so I reopen gmail multiple times a day.
