Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s latest peace offering to angry users of the company’s popular email service is getting a big, fat thumbs down.
In a little-noticed posting last weekend, Mayer announced plans to add a multi-tasking function, called Recent, to its 300 million-user email service.
Mayer hoped the new feature would mollify users irked at the recent elimination of the much-used tabs function. But so far, it’s not flying with Yahoo! users.
The new function allows them to easily see their most recent activities, while the tab feature allowed them to multi-task by toggling between separate emails.
Users blasted Mayer’s peace offering, saying the new Recent function doesn’t compensate for tabs. The remarks piled up Monday in comments on a post that has been trending on Yahoo!’s feature suggestions page since Yahoo got rid of tabs. The post, which pleads with Mayer to please bring back tabs, has attracted more than 100,000 votes and 9,319 comments as of Monday.
Clearly your RECENT idea is not the answer. The votes keep coming in! Just suck it up and BRING BACK TABS, said Adrienne on Monday.
Stacey Hurwitz, a public relations and marketing expert in Los Gatos, Calif., said she’s considering a permanent switch to Gmail due to the changes, despite being a loyal Yahoo! user since the late 1990s.
Her latest frustration: Not being able to find the “send” button on emails. She also finds frequent changes to the interface frustrating.
I feel like I have to relearn it every time and it’s just not what I want to spend my time doing, she said.
In an emailed statement, a Yahoo spokeswoman said the company replaced tabs with the new system because this new Recent view returns the multi-tasking benefits of tabs, by giving users a way to easily switch between different things they’re working on without cluttering up their screen.
We found that the downside of tabs is that as you did more in your inbox, more tabs would open, ultimately making it harder to multi-task,she said.