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Gmail design

By glazou on Thursday 17 January 2008, 10:46 - Standards - Permalink

Gmail is a cool web app. From a user's perspective, it's very nice, very responsive. From a coder's perspective, and in particular from the perspective of someone willing to tweak a little bit Gmail's UI, it's a nightmare though. Gmail uses a frameset and so many iframes that you have to manipulate a lot of documents. In front of me right now, I have roughly 15 iframes, and they're not used for ads but for real useful content. Geeeez.

Please Google, get rid of frames and iframes as soon as possible. Seriously. Sergey, you used to read this blog a while ago, please drop those painful frames and iframes for real content and move to real dynamic pages.

Comments

1. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 12:16 by RomeoJava

To be fair to Google they designed it to be used by the public not edited. They have managed to make it feel very sleek and responsive which is more than the AJAX Windows Live Hotmail has achieved!
Rj

2. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 17:49 by shaver

I think the use of frames there is intentional, such that navigation with back/forward buttons work in all their supported browsers.

The gmail folks have been adding API, though, for use in greasemonkey and other such tools, so I think they're interested in the general hackability of their app. Maybe you could find whatever Google Group they use to discuss the gmail API, and make feature requests to enable what you're after?

3. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 18:06 by John Silvestri

I think I read some time ago that some of that is used for the history tricking stuff. (So the "Back" button works.)

4. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 18:40 by Daniel Glazman

@John: good point. But still, when everyone removes frames, it's sad to see google have so many frames/iframes in a single window...

5. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 19:29 by florian

Are you using the latest version of Gmail (the french version may have not been updated yet)? I remember having about 15 frames on the Inbox page with the previous version, but now there are only 4.

6. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 22:10 by Peter Kasting

I echo florian's post. The new "Finto" UI is vastly different than the old "Fin" UI with regard to frame usage. I don't know the exact details, but make sure you're working with the new UI and I think your life will be easier.

7. On Thursday 17 January 2008, 22:42 by MT

i believe they need to use iframes to use extra threads - using normal ajax locks up the UI