Broken right-to-left writing in the new GMail compose interface

Shalom.

Dear Google, this is a cry for help.

It seems that the new GMail compose interface overrides Firefox’s Ctrl-Shift-X shortcut, which switches the writing direction. It also overrides the right-click->Switch writing direction function; it simply doesn’t do anything.

I cannot do this in Google Chrome either, because of bug 91178 – There seems to be no way to set an input’s direction on Linux nor Chrome OS.

I can probably switch the direction by using rich text, but using rich text has its own issues, and I usually want to send my email in plain text.

Dear Google, please fix this. I tried the new compose interface several times and I complained about this problem in emails to my googler friends. Unfortunately this is still not fixed, and starting from today I can’t go back to the old compose interface.

I understand, of course, that GMail is a free service that doesn’t come with a warranty. Dear Google, I am asking you a favor. You did, in fact, contribute quite a lot to the development of support for right-to-left languages on the Web. I am only asking you to keep this support good.

Thank you.

P.S. Dear Google, please ask Google employees who speak right-to-left languages to use Google products in these languages, and to write email in these languages. Dog-fooding is the best testing. Thank you, again.

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For the last couple of years I’ve been helping my parents to learn to use computers. Mostly very common and well-known things: GMail, Picasa, seraching Google, reading news websites, talking on Skype, the Russian social network Odnoklassniki, and not much more than that.

One of the most curious things that I found in my experiences with them is that emails and popups about new features are completely unhelpful to them. They always call me when they get them and ask me what to do now. It is awkward, because basically the emails tell them what to do, but instead of reading them and learning, they are reading them aloud to me:

— “It says: ‘Now you can find your friends more easily by typing their names in the search box’—so what do I do now?”

— “I don’t know… When you want to find somebody, type their names in the search box maybe?”

I am not saying that my parents are stupid; they aren’t. I am saying that these emails are not helpful. They appear to arrive from the helpful people in Google or Odnoklassniki, but the fact is that every time it happens, my parents are confused.

This makes me wonder: Is the effectiveness of these emails and popups and callouts researched? What are they good for? I don’t find them useful, because I actually like to find out things by myself; that’s my idea of user-friendliness: if it’s not self-explanatory, it is not user-friendly. My parents don’t find them useful, because they ask me what do the have to do. So is it useful for anybody?

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PS 1: I know that Odnoklassniki is awful. They insisted.

PS 2: I know that Skype is not Free Software and that it doesn’t respect people’s privacy. Give me something properly Free that actually works. For what it’s worth, I did teach both of my parents to use Firefox and they hate other browsers, and on my mother’s laptop I installed Fedora, so except Skype, her online experience is almost completely Free.