I use Google Mail and I love it. I began using it when it was still called Gmail and was an exclusive, by-invitation-only ordeal. At the time, the 1 GB of storage was a little overwhelming as the other offers, such as Yahoo! Mail, offered only around 6 MB. I now have over 2 GB of mail which I never foresaw coming. But still Google Mail exhibits some absolutely obnoxious traits that I sometimes have a hard time working around or getting over.
One of my biggest petpeeves about computers is their habit to bring a loading application to the foreground. I know this sounds logical, but for users who constantly multitask on the computer like I do, it’s incredibly irritating. I continually will have one application open and be busy doing something with that application, then need another application. I click on the icon of the new application to open it, then go back to the one I was using to continue whatever it was that I was previously doing. Regardless of which operating system I am using, Windows, Mac OS X or Linux — they all exhibit the same behavior, the loading application inevitably intrudes upon my work some few seconds (or even minutes, depending on the application and computer) later by opening and becoming the active application. This is especially annoying when I am trying to type something.
Google Mail acts the same way by bringing the current window, tab or even the browser itself to the foreground. As I do with standard applications, I multitask when I am surfing the web. I make heavy use of tabbed browsing and quite often I find myself loading Google Mail in one tab, then opening a new one to go to another website. As soon as I begin typing the URL of the page I want to go to, my fingers seem to go into some sort of automatic mode and by the time I press the enter button to navigate to the URL, Google Mail has made a nuisance of itself and changed the active tab. That means that I find myself navigating away from Google Mail to some partial URL (when the tab changes, it brings with it a clear address bar) that I have no interest in going to. That is incredibly obnoxious.
I know I should probably slow down and just wait for either Google Mail or the newly launched application to load, but that just isn’t how I work. I have tried it and I am simply too impatient.
Your thoughts on it?
