Comment by joshuamorton
6 years ago
I just measured it: switching between "drafts" and "inbox" on the new gmail takes ~15 ms, while on the simple HTML view, it takes 3-500ms per load.
Its literally 20 times faster, and importantly, cuts across the human visual perception boundary, which is at ~200ms. So the old HTML version is human perceptible, while the new version renders in ~1 frame.
Fair enough. On a fast enough machine. This is off-topic, but while on my beefy dev desktop I get similar times to you, this was absolutely not the case on a much weaker laptop I used sometimes during travel - and the latter is more representative of how regular people experience things.
(Also, FWIW, loading delay of HTML pages on said beefy desktop, as tested right now, are consistently about 750-1500ms for me.)
More on-topic, these times apply only when the pages are hot in the browser cache. On my desktop, the first-time switch between "drafts", "sent" and "inbox" takes around 3 seconds each, and only then it is instantaneous. So regular users are likely to experience these long Ajax delays more often than not.