Just because something can be done a certain way doesn't mean it should be done a certain way. Minimizing javascript for the sake of minimizing it is silly.

People that disable javascript represent a tiny percentage of the population. No one is going to make engineering decisions based on that tiny percentage, anymore than people still target IE6.

I'm not talking about minimizing for the sake of minimizing. I'm talking about not using JavaScript for the sake of JavaScript. Or better, not using JavaScript because you can't be bothered to understand what your problem is or how to avoid it.

- Page content doesn't need to be side-loaded in AJAX.

- Site layouts don't need to be set in JavaScript at page load. Animated menus don't need to be done in JavaScript and neither do pinned toolbars, doing so usually causes issues and stuttering when scrolling because you have a script running every pixel shift.

- Every link on the page doesn't need to be a JavaScript function, it makes bookmarking or opening in a new window difficult to impossible to what benefit?

- If you do want something to open in a new window, you also do not need JavaScript.

- User controls don't need to be JavaScript and when they are, they usually fail to work in mobile.

- Popover slideshow galleries don't need JavaScript to manage page reflow. Most shopping sites do this for their product images and it completely falls apart on Mobile when you pinch-zoom.

Far to often I find myself on pages that are unresponsive (not referring to Responsive Design) because they're so laden with JavaScript that everything comes to a screeching halt. Or worse still, some syntax error in one script brings the whole page down or one script reference doesn't load and the page is completely unusable.

Yeah, who cares about people using screen readers! Or search engines...

Google executes Javascript, and

>It is a common misconception that people with disabilities don't have or 'do' JavaScript, and thus, that it's acceptable to have inaccessible scripted interfaces, so long as it is accessible with JavaScript disabled. A 2012 survey by WebAIM of screen reader users found that 98.6% of respondents had JavaScript enabled.

http://webaim.org/techniques/javascript/

I often hear rationalizations about how x couldn't be built with graceful degradation in mind. There certainly are _some_ examples (games, for example). But GMail doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling example. GMail is also _just content_. The fancy ajax interactions, though nice, are hardly required for an email client.

This is a-historical by my memory - the entire reason Gmail became so successful was that its use of "fancy ajax interactions" made it shockingly nicer to use than any of its competitors at the time.

I think if one of your main selling points is interactivity afforded by javascript, then it is unlikely to have much return on investment to accommodate users who don't want that. But for sure people should be thinking harder about what their selling points really are - the market for "it's better because of ajax!" is probably tapped out.

AJAX isn't why Gmail became successful. What set Gmail apart from its competitors was the huge amount of initial storage you got (1 GB for free at a time when Hotmail offered less than 10 MB for free), a higher maximum attachment size (25 MB compared to the webmail standard 10 MB), Google search, and conversation view. All of which, by the way, worked with the AJAX-free basic HTML view.

Well, I doubt either of us have statistics for what really drove its success (and if you do, I'll gladly cede the point), but anecdotally, I and a lot of my friends at the time switched to Gmail not because we needed more storage (I don't remember even thinking about that as a problem with Hotmail at all) but because the interface was way better. If anything, I think it had more to do with the "cool" factor of getting an invite and the cachet of Google at the time than with the storage. But I freely admit this just personal experience talking.

Also the spam filtering was years ahead of it's time

I had forgotten how big a change conversation view was compared to other webmail.

Also for what it's worth, I still use the Basic HTML view because I find it a better experience, so AJAX was definitely not the selling point for me. The 1GB thing was a huge factor though.

For me, the basic view has always felt neglected and kind of halfassed. The full experience has fully styled UI elements where as the basic view just defaults to the browser defaults. Outlook does this too.

To me it just feels like basic view is just v1.0 from 2004.

It's definitely the uglier of the two views, no question. I prefer it functionality-wise though. It does less of its own window management, etc.

I think doing what they do, having a less-fancy separate client, is less complex.