Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.

Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.

Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?

This comment and a few others here make me feel old and sad for the people too young to remember that time. Yes, Google was an enormous breath of fresh air when it came out. 1000% better UI and features than the competition. Search was incredible. Gmail was a revelation. The whole company culture was night and day compared to the stodgy old tech companies like IBM. Just mind blowingly awesome. And then maps?? How did they even do that? The tech world felt entirely fresh and new and hopeful.

We have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.

Admittedly, it's a while ago. But original gmail, say, really did put a huge amount of effort into it.

Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.