Gmail's half-baked "always secure" offering

I was very happy to see the introduction of an "Always use HTTPS" option in my Gmail settings. For a long time I've been accessing Gmail via https://mail.google.com/ as this caused all traffic to be encrypted (rather than only the sign-in process), a good thing especially when you are away from home.

Unfortunately, enabling this new option breaks the Gmail Notifier application. Rather than release an updated version before offering the new feature, Google ask you to download the original file and apply this patch, actually a Registry file. Poor. And they don't even make this fix easy to find.

Also the S60 Gmail application for my phone is broken by the same setting. This is particularly surprising as a "Always use secure network connections (slower performance)" feature has been available for a long time. There is a workaround (here) but again this is much less than polished.

Come on Google, we expect better!