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Comment on Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

An additional frontend always brings in the question of “will this backend change break the other frontend?” It’s not so much the maintenence itself, but it may be holding back the main web interface.

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FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I admit I am totally out of my element here, but why can’t you keep updating the main interface and leave the HTML interface virtually as-is? What have they added to Gmail that could not either be replicated or just ignored on the HTML level? Aren’t the protocols still the same? I don’t understand how new code on the front end would make that stop working unless it was a complete overhaul, but I admit I could easily be missing something.

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- wmassingham@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The old HTML and new fancy interfaces both depend on a backend, presumably the same one. But if they want to change anything on the backend, they risk breaking any interface that uses it. So if they ignore it, it’ll probably end up broken.
  
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  - FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Interesting. Thanks.
    
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- bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That depends on how they have set everything up. In an ideal world the HTML page just gets its information more or less directly from the mail protocols you’d use with a separate client as well. But speaking from experience the tech is never set up ideally. Not even at billion dollar companies.
  
  Of course, it’s also very likely that they just want to kill the simple interface because they can track more stuff in the JavaScript one.
  
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- killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Stab in the dark here: HTML email is an attack vector that is under constant innovation by those who wish to exploit it. This likely leads to a not insignificant amount of investment by Google just to keep a step ahead of attackers.
  
  This is true of many types of software but most software doesn’t provide a user friendly route to being easily exploited by malicious third parties. In this case that is rendering HTML from unknown sources.
  
  That said, I still agree with your point. Google are a leader in the email space and any serious email service should be providing accessible ways of reading emails in all supported formats if they want to continue to be taken seriously.
  
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  - FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    The attack vector thing was certainly not an angle I thought about. Thanks.
    
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