Sure, Apple Mail uses about half a GB, too (same mailbox as I just loaded in Gmail, even). But that's the whole program, with several HTML emails open (a large thread) and my entire inbox scrollable instantly at once. Major view-switches take maybe 300-500ms, and its idle CPU use sits at 0.0%, not a constant 0.4-2.5%. And it doesn't have to reach out to a server to search, so some of that (I'm guessing quite a bit of it, actually) is likely in-memory search cache. That with what amounts to two of gmail's pages open (an email thread view, and a mailbox view, side-by-side—I only had the latter open in Gmail to achieve this much memory use)

Unlike Gmail and other google properties, I can leave it open for weeks and forget it's there. It doesn't affect overall system performance—because it's not demanding CPU time and forcing context switches when it's not doing anything.

[EDIT] incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something? I used to use it on machines with 256MB of memory total and it was not the only thing I had open, and it was totally fine. And yes, HTML email existed then. I was under the impression it was—thanks to neglect, basically—still on good, old tech and the plan to "improve" it to ditch that for bloated modern junk was still on the drawing board.

> Sure, Apple Mail uses about half a GB, too (same mailbox as I just loaded in Gmail, even). But that's the whole program

Okay... Gmail is also the whole program?

> That with what amounts to two of gmail's pages open (an email thread view, and a mailbox view, side-by-side

Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.

> incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something?

So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)...

> Okay... Gmail is also the whole program?

It's hosted in a browser. It gets things like HTML rendering "for free".

> Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.

I've never seen that and just tried to figure out how to do it just to see what it did to memory use. Couldn't. Did end up sitting around 680MB of memory (spiked to 800MB) looking at the same email thread I have open in Apple Mail, which, notably, doesn't exhibit those crazy memory-use spikes every time I click on anything.

[EDIT] What I'm talking about is a fairly typical email client 3-column layout, with folders and such in one column, the current mailbox or folder loaded in another (these two columns together are like the default layout when you first load Gmail), and an email thread in the remaining column, all open at once. I've never seen that in Gmail, and with both ~1min of poking around their interface and ~1min of Googling, couldn't figure out how to get that. I can get columns 1 & 2, or 1 & 3. Not 1, 2, and 3 all at once.

> So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)

Same. FF went way downhill in a hurry after the 2.x days.

Settings > Inbox > Reading pane

Hahaha, nice, thanks. I wasn't trying to be a jerk about that, I really couldn't find it & hadn't seen it before. Sure enough, there it is.

I honestly had no idea it was hidden behind a setting, I've had it turned on for ages (though I rarely use it)