>It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens
This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.
Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.
This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?
This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.
Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.
This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?