GWhine

I’m having doubts about the competence of the programmers at Google.

As you are probably aware, GMail is a free service, so this isn’t going to be an angry rant about how they’ve let me down blah blah blah. Rather, it’s an observation based upon how they’ve handled a particular query of mine.

A lot of the time, when I’m not feeling in the mood for AJAX, I use the “Basic HTML” view. A few months ago, I noticed that if you configured a different default “from” address, the Basic HTML mode would not pick up on this, and it would continue to use the default username@gmail.com address.

So I sent a little message to the GMail team, not so much a bug report as a suggestion for an improvement.

A few weeks later I remembered this incident, so I set up a little test to see if they had implemented my suggestion. However, I was getting inconsistent results. I probed a little deeper and found that if you clicked on the “reply” link then it appeared that the change had been made, but if you dared to use the “Quick Reply” feature, it still used the defaults. To illustrate, the standard Reply field sent emails as:

> Pete <username@yourdomain.com>

…and the Quick Reply sent emails as:

> Pete <username@gmail.com>

This was my first alarm bell. The initial state of affairs could easily have been an oversight during development, but this new observation suggested to me that there was insufficient abstraction in the replying mechanism. Rather than having one supreme “reply” function, with the two possible reply methods hooking into it at different places, it looked like the “Quick Reply” and the standard “Reply” were both using totally different functions, which is why it was possible to fix a bug in one of them but not the other. Generally, and specifically in this scenario, a bad thing.

So I sent another message to the GMail team detailing the new situation, and in the meantime I accustomed myself to avoiding the “Quick Reply” box.

Another few weeks have passed since then, so I ran my little test again. They’ve partly fixed it. The “Quick Reply” box now uses the specified default email address, which is good, but it doesn’t use the specified default “from” name. To illustrate, the standard Reply field still sends emails as:

> Pete <username@yourdomain.com>

…and the Quick Reply now sends emails as:

> <username@yourdomain.com>

Two observations. Firstly, there’s still no abstraction of the replying mechanism, which doesn’t really surprise me. But secondly, this kind of oversight is characteristic of someone who is (a) drunk, (b) habitually slapdash or (c) inexperienced as a programmer.

I’ve been led to believe that Google only hire talented, experienced programmers. What gives?

*UPDATE: It’s now fixed.*