GoogleJunk

[ceagle]

Saw a friend to try to fix a standalone program using GMail (on a mac this time, mostly inconsequential)... As you might know, Apple decides when they will arbitrarily (and somewhat un-ethically) mark applications as being "end of life" for certain editions of their O.S. and I thought this might be another one of those rather common problems.

Nope... instead it's Google this time. Apparently they decided to stop supporting a huge swath of apps as of May 30th. They also discontinued other support elements the following month. I wonder if the latter is why I've been wrestling a bit with browser functionality in GMail, which is spotty and uneven for a few weeks now. For instance, the pop-over EDIT SUBJECT editor doesn't always work. I am running some tests to see if any of their 'themes' might have more consistency / fewer fails than others.
One fairly consistent phail is that pop-over, when trying to work on DRAFTS. The entire message "seems" to open 'somewhere' into a phantom ether ... because the browser reacts, and yet no Draft can be seen in Tabs or anywhere on the screen.
The reliable solution is to Load the HTML Mail Version! Kinda funny that a nearly decade-old format is a dependable workaround for something they broke with those recent (poorly tested) updates!

But back to the former problem... this means the Apple basic Mail app can no longer be used on their computer. Interestingly, the iPad app is still working... for now I guess. I told them to not get too comfortable, and enjoy it while it lasts there.

As for the computer, they will now have to use the browser for GMail, as I didn't have time to locate any other standalone programs supported by GMail that will run on a Mac 10.8 OS
The final Thunderbird supported by that OS was 2017 and GMail blocks it.

Comments

[smraedis.livejournal.com]

I've noticed the gmail webpage has changed the design, and the new font hurts my eyes.
But if you click on the settings cog, and click the big "go back to the original gmail view" at the top, it makes it better again.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

*nodnod* ... Some of it really is quite annoying... *gently wingpats ya* ... Some of the functionality is still broken even in the older format now though, like the Edit Subject (which is really important) works very inconsistently (I haven't figured out the patterns that definitely work and which don't), plus I also found that there's cases where it won't accept a copy-paste of an email address in the TO field, even though I verified it was in the clipboard (had to type it out).
There's some cases where Drafts aren't working correctly either, and so far the only solution I've found is to load it in the old HTML editor!