This is insane. So I went to test it. 358 requests, 6.3MB, 20 seconds till full load.
Compared to the standard, really old view (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en): 14 requests, 25.3KB, 2 seconds.
Edit: fans were spinning hard, so I opened the task manager: after CPU went down from ~90% tab is using 600-700MB, stable, with the dev console open, 400-500MB closed. 400MB to check my email.
That's what the size of a webmail app should be measured in --- kilobytes, not megabytes.
A megabyte of code is a lot, and I'd guess a lot of developers just don't have the intuition of how much that is; to put it into perspective, this is an entire operating system in 1.44MB: http://menuetos.net/
No cache reload: 28 requests, 114KB, 2.45 seconds.
With cache: 28 requests, 12KB, 2.65 seconds. Funny: UI seems ready after 1 second, but there's an eventsource request that dwarfs the rest in the waterfall, taking the rest of the time.
Edit: playing around with the UI, feels close to native.
Edit 2: downvotes, feel free to engage in discussion. Getting tired of the HN mob.
And I have pretty much all behaviors (e.g. menu on hover) disabled.
Web apps and things like electron have their place. But if you are creating an application to be used all the time, you should make it native.
Electron is fine, and webapps can be very fast, but that takes proper coding with a focus on performance and UX. Many companies just don't care.
I told them: no man, it's not cache and cookies. You're loading too much stuff on initialization. It takes about 45 seconds for page load, and it's not until 1m37s that I can compose an email. You're making about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. That's the size of a long pop song on iTunes!
I've now bookmarked the old "html gmail" just so I can compose emails in a jiffy. I think they assume I leave a browser tab open for email. Not when it's so heavy weight.