I've read about this before, but I just tried the new look. There's a dense version and a (less?) dense.
There is a lot of white space in between fonts. Was Gmail going for simpler? Well, it's less clutter, I agree, but I immediately thought of Chromebooks and other netbooks and quickly changed my resolution to emulate how it would look. As I feared, upper button (arrow left and right) didn't fit along with other buttons. I think I see to little amount of mail this way and I'm not that comfortable with that. I went and opened an email. Percentage of opened mail from my screen is too small.
I went back to my 16:9 on my 14 inch laptop. The size of my opened mail is much more comfortable, but when I scroll all the way up, almost half of my screen height is a filled with things I'm not going to look at. I pulled a full screen view, the portion was about 1/3, which I think is more okay to me.
So I'm really worried about how it would look on smaller screen laptop, especially netbooks. I hope something can be done about this. Maybe they can shave the white space between the buttons I mentioned (archive, spam, delete, etc.) to increase the space in my screen that I can really utilize while reading my email.
Another thing came to mind, it would be nice if once opened, the mail can emerge and stay in focus while others blur and go to background, like the reader feature in Safari browser. Anything to increase the size, which I think, in this 14 inch screen, is not big enough.
Went back to the email preview. The vertical white spaces between emails are really starting to annoy me now. To far apart.
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