Also, Google Search and Gmail were REALLY GOOD back when Google made really good products, and they both seem to be treated as sacred there. Neither has received truly radical changes to fit with Google's new and often transient business focuses. Had Google made the mistake of replacing Gmail with Inbox, Gmail would've gone the way of everything else Google's done lately. But it seems like someone rightfully has ensured the two "big ones" stay largely unmolested.
If anything, both Google Search and Gmail have received negative changes.
I've been using DDG for years, though I'll return to Google Web search periodically (Books and Scholar I use more often). It's nagware that's begging me to make it my default browser (no, you blew through that trust relation ages ago, sweetheart), and long before then stopped providing actual usable URL links in favour of its craptacular redirects. On desktop I've got a demungifier script I can run those through, on Android, if I see those, I remember why I don't use Google Web search, abandon it, and return to DDG.
Google News, in a moment of major irony, fails to work at all on Chrome/Android.
The company lost its soul a long time ago. It's been losing its mind for some years now.
Basic HTML Gmail (yes, the one that loads the entire page again for almost any action) is so much faster than AJAXified Gmail (let alone Inbox) that it's worth a couple missing features to use it instead, IMO.
Which is incredibly stupid since maybe the biggest original selling point of AJAX was "it's faster because you don't have to reload the whole page".
And of course the memory use is way, way lower. Especially than Inbox, which is a resource hog.
IMO most google products have been getting steadily worse since ~2008/09. Including things like Youtube.
It was intended to replace Gmail, until Google found out even Googlers hated it.
> The Gmail team did not have to wait for the reaction for long. And it wasn’t very “googly.” It caused an uproar teeming with disgust for just about every decision the Gmail product/design team made. Phrases like, “You guys just completely destroyed Gmail!” and “What are these crazy designers doing over there?!” were everywhere. From being spoken at many of Google’s cafes to every internal online forum.[0]
