Yesterday I had my carpets cleaned. I unplugged and removed my desktop tower from under the desk and decided not to put it back the same day, as the carpet was still damp. Instead I fired up my laptop to read the mail.

I don't have pop3 email set up on that machine, so I went into gmail with firefox. I haven't done that for a long time. And I got completely stuck. I really thought that lever thing under the trackpad that you use for clicking (what's it called by the way?) had given up the ghost. In the end I shut the browser window, then started again. And this time I got a prompt asking me if I wanted to use the default interface or the "traditional html" one. I opted for traditional and suddenly everything worked normally.

What has Google gone and done to its interfaces?

PS: I've found a partial answer here.. It seems I'm not the only one who's been having problems.

They started using the 'improved' interface quite a while back.

No idea why they thought they had to change it, as it is much slower than the old one, on my machines.

(Using the 'HTML' version is also quite a pain!)

The "improved" version was such a hassle to use that I opted to use only the basic HTML version (they still let you do this). I quite like it actually because it is so much faster on my laptop.

HTML5 - everyone uses html5 now, or should be instead of flash, etc.