Google has announced that their Gmail web-based e-mail service is once again expanding, adding new features, including support for 49 languages. While most extra e-mail features already supported numerous languages, the new update should make Gmail the first truly international advertising supported e-mail service.
On the occasion of Gmail’s fifth birthday (actually five years from the official launch — the program itself has been around longer than that), it seems that Google is renewing its pledge to make Gmail a one-stop e-mail, chat, word processor, image editor and so much more. The addition of the new languages also breaks down another barrier– all of the Gmail-related Google apps will be available in every supported language, including Google documents, photos and others.
With the new upgrade, Google hopes to trump both Microsoft and Yahoo, its biggest competitors in the web-based e-mail arena, by making Gmail the de facto e-mail service for hundreds of countries worldwide.
Google Labs is responsible for the new update, and to date has produced more than 40 add-on applications that are available when a user signs in to their Gmail account. Google Labs is described by the Company as its experimental research and development headquarters, and many of Google’s best loved features have come out of the lab.
But all of these add-on applications and additional languages also increase the programming code for Gmail. Google uses a custom JavaScript code to render Gmail, and with the addition of so many new features and language choices, critics charge that the traditional Google “small footprint” is turning into just another bloated, sluggish to run software program, reminiscent of many Microsoft products.
In fact, with the addition of the 49 new languages supported by Gmail, there are now trillions of different code variations necessary to render each user with a customized page, tailored around their specific needs and language choices. Of course, all this extra code increases the chance there will be bugs and problems to sort out to keep Gmail functioning as simply and trouble-free as users have come to expect.
The real challenge for Google is to continue increasing the functionality of Gmail and offering new services, while keeping the program from becoming processor intensive and bloated with potentially unnecessary code. For their part, Google insist they’ve found a good balance, though critics have already noticed that the new Gmail is becoming (slightly) less responsive and slower to load than previous versions.
