[macp]

Agreed! I vote for this.

It's not just an issue of speed. The new gmail design is very hard to read/understand. Red-on-pink is not the best contrast choice. The icons feel fuzzy without the button borders, are hard to decode, and are too tight together.

Strangely, while the icons are all packed tightly, the email list wastes extra space vertically, and requires extra scrolling. Not the best design choice.

The high-contrast theme brings gmail close to the classic design, but it does not work well enough to make the icons more recognizable and recover the wasted space in the email list.

[joshuamorton]

You can make the email list more compact, (and in fact it tells you as much the first time you open the app).