Gmail Lab’s Reply-to-All
I don't know about everyone else, but I tend to send hit 'Reply to All' much more frequently than just Reply. So when the Gmail labs feature to make 'Reply to All' the default became available, I was rather excited. It isn't much (a simple click on a drop down) but it made life more convienient and I rather enjoyed it. The other day I replied to an email intended for 4 people and realized that I'd sent it only to the person who sent the last email in the thread. Confused I went back into the thread and replied again, only this time did I realize that reply was the default and not 'Reply to All'
I searched Labs and discovered that the feature was gone, after some googling I came across this link. It contains a very minimal comment stating that it was removed because it was causing issues for people who had enabled it, followed by a series of responses requesting the feature be brought back. Obviously it was working for a number of people, myself included.
Now, I can accept that in my lifetime the beta tag on my Gmail may never disappear and I can accept that adding a Labs feature may break my "Gmail experience". What I don't get is how a feature from Labs could be pulled because it's causing some people a bad user experience? Perhaps those people just shouldn't use it. Let those of us that want to risk the alpha release (after all if Gmail is beta, Labs can only really be considered alpha). I assumed risk when I enabled the feature, I've accepted that... those people who are having issues also assumed risk... let them suffer on their own.
Anyways, this post had two purposes... the first was to inform anyone who hadn't yet noticed that their "Reply to All" feature was gone and second to rant about an alpha feature being pulled.