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Gmail Mobile: Snappier on iOS 4, Still Featuring Fuzzy Graphics

If you use Gmail as your default email client and you happen to use it on your iPhone browser as well (because quite frankly, it’s just better than Mail.app) you may have noticed that Google rolled out a few changes in the past weeks.
The Google Mobile team made Gmail snappier with a much smoother scrolling on iOS 4 and managed to fix that weird issue with scrollbars continuously moving when scrolling the page. Gmail mobile has fixed scrollbars now. Yay.

If you use Gmail in your mobile browser a lot, you may have noticed that we recently tried several different variations of these buttons. We‘ve iterated on the design and made improvements based on your feedback. If you have more suggestions, please post them in our forum, or if you use Twitter, mention #gmailmobile and we’ll take a look. If you’re a developer and are interested in learning about the Javascript and HTML techniques we used to do this, we’ll post an article to code.google.com/mobile in the coming weeks.

The webapp indeed feels much faster and native-like: scrolling through a long conversation almost feels like flicking through a native iOS app, and loading times seem to have dramatically improved. I can see some of these fixes on the iPad as well.

Too bad the webapp still doesn’t support the Retina Display. Icons and toolbars are fuzzy and blurry, and so is the webclip icon even if Google suggests you go save the app as a bookmark on your homescreen. Sorry I won’t. I’ll just keep using Mailroom.

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