Google will discontinue the Basic HTML version of its Gmail service in January 2024.
It’s unclear when Google made the decision to end Basic HTML support – news of which can be found in this support page titled “Use the latest version of Gmail in your browser.” Archive.org’s last capture of the page comes from late 2022, and Google’s own cache has not coughed up info that would identify the date of the change.
The Register asked Google when the decision to end Basic HTML was made, and why.
A spokesperson sent us the following statement:
“The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality.”
Google suggests that not including “full Gmail feature functionality” is the point of the Basic HTML offering. When your correspondent loaded it, Google delivered a warning that it is “designed for slower connections and legacy browsers.”
Intriguingly, when we used Chrome’s Inspect>Network tool to test the HTML page’s load time, it came in at 1200 milliseconds. Full fat Gmail loaded in 700 milliseconds – but then kept loading elements for almost a minute before settling down.
The decision has been criticized by Pratik Patel, who describes himself on Mastodon as “a blind technologist … who finds himself championing #accessibility for fun and necessity.”
“I know many #blind people who use GMail’s HTML view. Not only will they be confused but will be unhappy,” he wrote.
Patel also noted that Google has made Basic HTML view harder to find in recent months – a change he understands now that the feature has been cancelled.
Google is infamous for discontinuing services that – for whatever reasons – don’t meet its goals. Over the years it has killed off favorites like its RSS reader, flops like Wave, projects like Google Code that lost to rival offerings, and invasive ad tech that its peers rejected.
But the Big G has also kept some offerings alive after user uprisings. In 2022, for example, it persisted with the free G Suite legacy edition after fielding many complaints from users who felt they were promised the service would be available in perpetuity.
Google insists it is “committed to making accessibility a core consideration” and lists many accessibility features in Gmail – among them screen reader support and hands-free email.
Some alternatives to consider are Protonmail, Tutanota and mailbox.org. I recently migrated some accounts to Tutanota and some others to mailbox.org (mostly accounts that I needed IMAP/SMTP access to) and have enjoyed both, quirks withstanding. It’s a lot of work to migrate, but it feels oddly cleansing.
If you want to get fancy, you can introduce something like AnonAddy(Addy.io)/SimpleLogin and use email aliases for everything. They add another layer of protection for spam and breaches, and also allow for some advanced mailbox filtering. Also, once it’s in an aliasing service, it’s super easy to migrate between email providers (just a check box to choose a different mailbox).
I moved from Gmail recently. Since you need to go around updating all your sites to your new email address anyway it’s worth signing up for an alias service. Personally I went with my own domain hosted on SimpleLogin. I moved all my sites to aliases before moving away from Gmail. It then took less than a minute to update all my aliases to point to my new mailbox provider (Proton). The only site that knows about my new email address is SimpleLogin. I don’t plan on giving out my proton email address to anyone else. If someone needs to email me they’ll get their own alias to send to!
I have my own domain but have been doing my email thru gmail - when i go to check from my webmail the amount of spam is insane. Is there good alternatives that do decent anti-spam. (Been a long time since I checked)
Ditch that email address.
Create a new domain (preferred option) or use one provided by an alias provider (like SimpleLogin). Move all your sites to their own alias. At this point you should be getting no spam at all. If you do though you’ll know which site it came from as they have their own alias. You can simply disable that alias and no more spam.
You don’t need a spam filter anymore!
Interesting but extreme idea! I guess I could have my own alias’ as well. I have used gmails + thing quite a bit. They just make it so darn convenient lol.
