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