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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. Thanks.
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.
The attack vector thing was certainly not an angle I thought about. Thanks.