I've noticed that since getting into G+ my Gmail tab in safari constantly has the spinner showing. (OS X) I suspect the new status bar at the top is doing some aggressive polling or long-polling to get notifications.
That said, I have not experienced any of the problems the author describes, and I think it's telling that he does not mention his system specs, or the browsers effected, or his network conditions. Maybe he's behind a firewall that munges the Accepts-Encoding header, defeating gzip.
I'm on a state of the art macbook air, and the problems described occur on every modern browser (chrome, firefox, safari)), and they occur on every wifi network I connect to (Cable, DSL. No firewall.
Didn't some one post something similar last year(?) and it ended up they were getting chucked into the wrong server pool or something and someone at google fixed that?
i'm using > 3GB of space on my account. often times i notice that a mail takes forever to be sent. i'm using a macbook air and a 3.1MBPS connection, no firewall
That said, I have not experienced any of the problems the author describes, and I think it's telling that he does not mention his system specs, or the browsers effected, or his network conditions. Maybe he's behind a firewall that munges the Accepts-Encoding header, defeating gzip.