There could literally be thousands of reasons for why GMail seems to be running slower and slower for me:

• FireFox Extensions?
• I use FireBug (which Google has told me to switch off)
• I use GreaseMonkey
• I use the Web Developer AddOn
• Network connection?
• The firewall behaves funnily at work
• Too many processes running?
• Doesn't explain why other websites run fine though.
• FireFox default caching mode?

The thing is, it really shouldn't be "my problem" to work out what's wrong with GMail.  As far as I'm concerned, other websites continue to work fine, and if I switch to the basic GMail view, it works fine too.  So there must be something wrong with the standard version of GMail.

Which really got me to think about the whole connection between web and PC.

I use GMail because:

• Lots of space - but that's hardly new now - everybody is out there throwing hard-drive spaces at you
• Can use everywhere, simple and fast - again I'm not so sure about the speed anymore
• Easy to get my centralized data out - this turned out to be a bit of a false impression.  It is difficult to get data out of Google.  May be there will be new Google API eventually, I can only hope.

I use an offline mail program (like Windows Live Mail) because:

• Offline reading, if mail server is down I don't lose access to my mail
• Composing experience offline is better, GMail with its auto-save and FireFox's build-in dictionary comes pretty close though
• Stripping advertising
• Combines blog reader, podcast and videocast facilities - which I can then synchronize to a portable player
• Speed of browsing emails, waiting for an webpage to load is silly

You would think Microsoft should theoretically have an advantage with their desktop/web integration strategy, I'm just not sure why it hasn't been executed (or received favourably) yet.