As life’s certainties echo with themes of death and taxes, there’s another predictable force—Google’s penchant for discontinuing services or features, often ones cherished or exceptionally practical. This time, the scythe swings toward one of the company’s longstanding features: Gmail’s basic HTML view. Set to bid its farewell to the digital realm, this simple interface, a relic of Google’s past, will cease to exist come January 2024.
For many, this news may seem like a no-brainer most people are familiar with the standard view, which is the default when you log into Gmail through the web. It’s full featured, with support for modern fonts, a customizable inbox, integrated chat features, rich text formatting, and more. Meanwhile, the basic HTML view is exactly as described it looks like something from 2005 and behaves like it, too. All you can really do is read your email.
But that simplicity is what made the basic HTML view so perfect. Because it takes so little data to access, you could still access Gmail with a bad internet connection or while on an ancient device. More than one member of the PCWorld staff uses the basic HTML view—some during trade shows or conventions, others wherever local reception is bad. Even if service crawls along at the equivalent of 2G or slower speeds, you’re not shut out of your inbox.
While this development is disappointing, it’s not surprising. Google’s been pushing multiple products and projects onto the chopping block as of late. Google Domains is gone, as is the Pixel Pass program. It’s a stark contrast with Microsoft, which not only gives reprieves to venerable apps once marked for retirement, but decides to soup them up, too
