Gmail unbearably slow? A minor fix.
Over the past six month I have perceived that Gmail and Google Apps mail have become slower and slower. I’m using it on high-speed connections, so bandwidth is not the issue. I have lost quite a lot of time sitting around waiting for the Gmail interface to finish loading so that I could perform even the most basic operation. Even worse is that the way Firefox is implemented, if one window/tab has pending operations, you may not be able to do anything with other Firefox windows/tabs until those operations have completed, so I was often left with Firefox being totally wedged until Gmail would finish loading. The basic HTML interface is faster, but it’s no fun at all. Today I decided to do something about it, or at least try.
Through observation — and the interface gave me plenty of time to do it — I discovered that the overall slow loading seemed to coincide with the loading of the little star images next to each message row in a list view, which can be used to quickly flag a message as important. The image itself is transparent image called cleardot.gif and is used in a number of places. It is just a placeholder that the interface uses to mark where an icon will actually go, and then which icon gets displayed in that location is handled with CSS via a background image.
In any case, I noticed that if I disabled images altogether for the domain mail.google.com, that the interface speeded up absurdly, and was still quite usable. However, there were a few images that I didn’t want to go away. What I ended up doing was adding the offending image URL to my Adblock Plus rules. The web interface is now at least 50% faster for me, if not more.
The main things I notice as missing now are the paper clip icon indicating an attachment in the list of messages, and the star icons next to each message row. Neither one of those things was really necessary for me. I can still flag messages as important, just not through that icon, and attachments still show up in messages, I just can’t know if a message has an attachment until I open it, which is an acceptable loss for me for the incredible speedup of the interface.
The offending image URL for regular Gmail is: https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif. No big deal, it’s small, but sometimes it had to fetch that same image dozens of times to complete the interface.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:43 am
This made a huge difference in my gmail experience! I never used the stars anyway, so I don’t miss them at all. Thanks!!
April 13th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Holy crap thanks dude. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of doing that before – good thinking on your part, thanks for finding out the offending gif. My gmail is 200% less annoying now. I knew it was something to do with faulty image caching. I hope that others stumble onto your blog, it’s kind of an odd google search to find!
April 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Wow, thanks. For some reason this has been a real problem for me at work for a while now. I don’t notice it at home at all though. It’s always been that stupid star image that I don’t use that takes for ever when I pull up a long list of e-mail messages. I don’t know how they could possibly have screwed this up so badly, is it firefox or gmail? It’s a small image that should be cached and handled quickly.
May 15th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
IT WORKS!!!! Thanks, grazie, спасибо!!!
June 19th, 2009 at 12:09 am
The problem is even worse running FF under Linux as the rendering engine seems to be significantly slower than I had previously seen under Windows/Mac. Thanks for the protip.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:54 am
I have suffered from this same problem in the recent month or few.
The only things which are worth noting in my case is that I have a lot of tabs open at any given time (~50-80) and am using the Tree Style Tabs plugin. Actually the installation of that plugin may coincide with the sluggishness but it was a few months ago so I cannot be sure.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:06 am
Bad grammar in my previous post, read with: s/is that/are that/ in the second sentence.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Well this may have provided a solution:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=611876
I reversed the Adblock rule and have not yet suffered the symptoms. I will know more after a few days, but anyone else still with this might give it a shot.
In my case, only one of them was set to false and it was overriding the default. I do not recall now if it was disk or memory but I do not recall toggling it in the first place, so it may be triggered by a plugin if the security model permits such actions.
July 1st, 2009 at 7:54 am
FFLinux User, that seems to have solved it. browser.cache.memory.enable was set to false for me, and setting it to true is giving me fast gmail load times.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:41 am
This is good news and I’m glad to see that it may not have been some really bad design by Google, but instead possibly a bad browser configuration. However, I did just check in my own install of Firefox and found browser.cache.memory.enable to be true. Maybe some upgrade fixed that? I don’t use Gmail anymore so I’m not sure whether it’s still an issue. But in any case I’m glad to see that that setting has fixed it for you. Thanks!