Gmail, the Prince Frog

Gmail forced its new look on me today. It sucks. I can barely read the page. I can barely discern what constitutes a row per each email. And the color scheme truly hurts my eyes. Add to that: none of the other themes were better for me than the default. Forget the fact that I find most of them too playful (read: unprofessional), but I just can't look at the page long enough to read anything. The good old "classic" theme appears to be gone. I guess it's too much for me to remember that image is everything these days. I thought email was about content, but apparently it's about inducing seizures and catering to a world in which ideas come in 140-character, bite size pieces posing as entrees. Anyway, I was able to revert to the old-school HTML view by using Firefox's VIEW>PAGE STYLE>NO PAGE STYLE menu option. That forced Gmail to ask me if I wanted to use the HTML view because it couldn't show off its fancy pants to me anymore. After I set HTML as the default, I went back to Firefox's menu bar and chose VIEW>PAGE STYLE>BASIC PAGE STYLE. Now, I've got the HTML view as my default. It's not as nice as the missing "classic" view but it's way better than the hideous monstrosity I was being subjected to against my will. Does no one learn from Facebook's follies of forcing unnecessary UI changes on their users? Update, January 4, 2012: Silly me. Under the settings there's the "Revert to the old look temporarily" option that I couldn't find anymore as of yesterday. So I just am using that ... for now.