Google Strikes Again!

ScrewedLast week, Google made yet another subtle change that impacted me in a negative way. And I’m not talking about the “mobilegeddon” that seems to be top-of-mind in the Internet marketing world right now. I don’t particularly care about mobilegeddon, although I do think it’s probably a good idea to migrate to a mobile-friendly WordPress theme, which I plan to do eventually.

No, I’m talking about a change in GMail. It took me a while to confirm what happened, but Google has rendered Gmail incompatible with LastPass, my password manager of choice. Where I used to be able to login to my Gmail account with two mouse-clicks, it now takes 8, and about 10 times as long. It involves reloading a page, then going to LastPass via a right-click and finding the correct entry in a fairly long list. Twice.

I’m still trying to find a way to make things work in the way they used to, but haven’t found one yet.

Way to go, Google. NOT.

Yes, I still use GMail, primarily to have a web-based way of accessing my email with relatively good spam-filtering.

I’m still inching my way toward the goal of a Google-free life, but it’s a real challenge. I think I can now do Thunderbird access to my email from the cloud, but I still have a lot of work to do to make that as easily accessible as GMail used to be.

Update: I did find a slightly shorter login sequence, which takes only about 3 times as long as it did before last week.

  1. Click on my menu entry for gmail
  2. Click on the login email
  3. Click next
  4. Click on login button (without entering password)
  5. Gmail will then complain that password is wrong, but LassPass will now recognize the URL
  6. Click on LastPass icon and select password
  7. Click next… and it logs me in.

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