I have an enterprise account and they added this button today. Guess what used to be there? The profile image where you could so conveniently swipe up or down to switch between gmail accounts. This is the kind of UI garbage that makes you want to move your entire company to another service just because you can.
It’s on my desktop Gmail and I’ve been having a shitty time trying to disable it and remove it.
Literally asked Gemini how to remove Gemini and it said it did not know, then I called it stupid, and then it apologised and said I can remove Gemini in the Gmail settings, but I couldn’t find the option after yelling at it in all caps and it’s still there just taunting me
for fun ask gemini if water freezes at 20 degrees
it should be considered harassment to advertise like this
Advertisements should be considered harassment.
The only ads I get are from temu vaguely aligned with my interests
I do not sell drugs, I’m on the other side of that market
flute kinda looks like a fancy penjamin
I like using shotguns in videogames sometimes. I’ve only seen a real one a handful of times.
It is
Time to move to something else
Taking a play out of Microsoft’s book. Must be desperate.
I saw a Copilot prompt in MS PowerPoint today - top left corner of EVERY SINGLE SLIDE - and I had a quiet fit in my cubicle. Welcome to hell.
Despite have AI off as much as possible within our Google Workspace at work, today all of my coworkers have received multiple ads / prompts by Google to use Gemini. In Gmail, in Google Meet, and more. Our policies don’t allow us to use it so this is just ridiculous.
They are billing your company for it as well
Gemini? The Teletext-alike web?
move
To who?
Posteo is pretty damn good, too.
I replaced gmail with fairemail for similar reasons. I can’t stand their interface, designed to maximise clicks on the wrong locations.
Main problem is that now google requires developers of email clients to give $4000 in annual fees (level 3? or level 2 for just $500 is enough?) at their friends at KPMG to do yearly audits of the code, so they will kill most alternatives in few years now that oauth is mandatory
I used to use FairEmail, and IMO it’s one of the best email clients available on any platform, but it started acting weird as my account got larger. Taking forever to sync, not sending emails (just keeping them in the outbox), etc. I switched to K9 Mail, which has now become Thunderbird for Android.
Main problem is that now google requires developers of email clients to give $4000 in annual fees (level 3? or level 2 for just $500 is enough?) at their friends at KPMG to do yearly audits of the code
On one hand, I think audits are a reasonable idea. Some of the most sensitive data is in people’s emails, and most accounts can have their passwords reset via email. You really wouldn’t want malicious code touching that stuff. On the other hand, that’s definitely a large expense for an open source project :/
I’m glad some providers are moving towards OAuth or OIDC for logging in to email. Regular auth is very outdated and doesn’t support two-factor auth. It’ll just take a while to get there.
for FOSS projects, google itself could sponsor the certification, if they really cared about security and not just closing the garden. The code is public and they could definitely write automated tests to check all they need to check, and at every single commit, and not just yearly, done in secret by some auditor.
For google drive integration, i saw that most devs are just removing support for it because doesn’t make sense to pay $500 yearly to support it when there’s a million of better alternatives
The code is public and they could definitely write automated tests to check all they need to check, and at every single commit
The other thing they’d need to verify is that the app that’s uploaded to the Play Store or whatever other platform it’s on matches the code, which can be hard to deal if the build isn’t reproducible (that is, if every build produces a binary that differs in some way, like if there’s a timestamp embedded in it). This is one reason I like F-Droid - F-Droid build and package the apps on their end, so you can guarantee that the compiled app matches the source code.
For google drive integration, i saw that most devs are just removing support for it
I’ve worked on both sides of this (a big tech company providing an API to access data, and a smaller company or open source project utilizing said API) so I understand both arguments.
In addition to cost, there’s also complexity, as often the big tech company’s compliance issues/requirements become the small developer’s compliance requirements too. For example, there can be issues with storing data from European users outside of the EU, you may need a terms of service or privacy policy that explains what you do with the data, you may need to handle erasing the data if the user deletes their Google account, etc. Other companies like Facebook have similar concerns, and the Facebook Graph API is relatively restrictive as a result (to prevent third party apps from abusing data, like what happened with Cambridge Analytica).
All of that adds a lot of overhead for people that are just creating small apps and want easy integrations.
It must be infuriating to work for whoever makes these decisions. I don’t think I would ever actually email them about anything because there’d be no way I could possibly trust that the reply I get is actually something they wrote
“adding a feature” = “forcing”
The profile image is still there, right beside the gemini button, and you can still swipe on it.
Well I didn’t ask for this and I pay them for this and multiple accounts. If it wasn’t forced there would be a setting to turn it off
While we are talking about shit that Google pulls that drives us crazy can we talk about the pop-up asking me if I know about driving mode EVERY SINGLE TIME I LAUNCH MAPS FROM MY CAR.
I fuckin know about it Google. I have said yes every single goddamn time. Stop fuckin asking me.
Agree this is shit UX but…
How am I just now discovering you can do the swipe to change accounts
Yeah I used to go in the menu and click the other accounts one at a time until a friend showed me. Its this and removing the youtube click to add to queue popup that drive me bananas. They both worked so well why would you change it?
I did not know you could do that… It’s a great usability feature, and they probably ditched it because nobody uses it, because nobody knows about it, because they’ve done precisely nothing to help people find it
Well, it’s still working on mine for personal email, I hope they don’t kill it off entirely, but I’ve lost hope googie will ever stop destroying good user experiences in favor of shittier ones that have less functionality (I’m still pissed about Inbox and Play Music)
Same with the open tab number/button in Firefox mobile (and its derivatives). Swipe left/right on that button.
Better than when they switched sides in the play store and my thumb couldn’t reach the check for updates :(
Delete your Google account already
K-9 mail/Thunderbird Mail
Not totally Foss but I don’t think it is bad. I just like k-9 better.
K9 stopped supporting gmail, only thunderbird does now
