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.
The main trouble is the same with switching any email service really.
You need to update your email everywhere....everywhere.... this usually means keeping the old email account alive perpetually just in case you find some old account you didn't (or can't) update.
You need to back up all your old emails. This is usually easy on things like Outlook or Thunderbird or anything similar.
Use an email alias service and you'll never need to change your email address on sites again in the future. You can change to a new mailbox provider in the future and update all your aliases to point to your new email address within a minute.
so mail forwarding?
Yes, but also no. When I reply to an email my mailbox address is not exposed. The email appears to have come from the alias.
That's a great solution but still takes a bit to switch to initially. I'm just talking about the switchover, after that using an alias service or having your email on your own domain helps save a lot of pain later.
Yep. It takes a long time to go around updating all your sites. I've had lots of sites where I have to contact them to change my email address as you can't do it yourself. Even instances where it just can't be done so I've asked for account deletion instead. Still, never again now.
I can sympathise with the problem, but are people not writing down somewhere which sevices they're logged into with Google? I'm sure there's a bit in the settings where you can see it, now I think.
Google lists the sites you use single sign on for, but it doesn't keep track of how many sites list your Gmail account as your recovery email, or the sites where you had to create an account that uses your email as your username.
If you're lucky all those accounts aren't important, but there's always a chance you'll forget one that matters and if youve canceled your Gmail account you'd be screwed if you need to recover that random account.
So you're basically stuck keeping Gmail alive for a few years even after you've stopped using it just in case you forgot some accounts.