Soon, Your Gmail Might Look Like This

Start penning the Gmail epitaphs, because your beloved email client is staring down the barrel of a renovation. Images of a possible Gmail redesign leaked to Geek Monday confirm that everything you ever loved must go away. Sure, the redesigned Gmail probably comes with way better features and a much less clunky interface that doesn't hearken back to the mid-2000s — and that's why we hate it.

Gmail, once lauded for being the disruptive email client that upset then-competitors Yahoo! and Hotmail, has been criticized of late for being old-school, with all the attendant knick-knacks and paddywhacks such a name implies. The service has been through various hated redesigns, but it has retained a lot of the same features over the years, and sure, some of them you never use. But it's still nice to know they're there, gumming up your toolbars in their same familiar spot.

This new design promises to upset all that. Geek's screengrabs show a radically redesigned user interface with a bunch of nonsensical looking icons and new features I don't feel like dealing with. They've stuck all the important stuff in the reigning "hamburger"-style drop-down menu on the upper-left, and most egregiously moved the list of available Gchat contacts to a part of the window the client has conditioned us all to ignore, because right now it's filled up with creepily targeted advertisements.

The new system also gets rid of "tabbed" or "ranked" inboxes in favor of a system that's categorized by date. At the bottom right is a kind of expandable storage system for all the crap you've forgotten about doing, like unfinished messages, reminders, and of course, a way to write new emails. This sounds like kind of a good idea, but we're going to be curmudgeons about it because nothing gold can stay and life is but a walking shadow.

You're getting old. Start your nostalgia engines.

Images: Geek.com