But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6 was.
If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.
> If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read.
Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor support of HTML and CSS in email.
I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google services all together, the product decisions just can't be trusted from a user perspective.
For most services there's a better alternative (e.g. DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this was a learning process for me to distrust systems that control me more than the other way around by creating a lock-in to an ecosystem.
I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the convenience that Google offers can be replicated through good processes and automation.
I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16 year:ish etc
They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.