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In the past, logging in to Gmail was pretty simple. It presented a standard login page requesting your username (email address) and password.
Now it seems that they have made it twice as much work. The login page now looks like this:
Is there a way to get a simple single page login like they had before?
Any ideas as to why Google chose to make it twice as much work to login?
There does not appear to be an option to go back. A workaround for now is to log in to another Google service (e.g., Drive) which still has the old form. This does not necessarily make it faster (since you'd have to switch back to Gmail) but at least it makes it possible to use password managers as before.
As for ideas why... one plausible reason is to thwart phishing sites that display a fake login form. The new form shows your picture and full name after the first step, which a fake site would be unlikely to have. Some banking sites had such 2-step process for a long time.
Another way I've found is to set your User Agent string to either IE or something completely made up.
It seems Google only likes to annoy "supported" browsers.
To change back go to the little cogwheel icon top right and you will find a menu option to go back to the old one - but I'm still having to log in twice pretty often - maybe not every time - on the old version. You can also give feedback on that menu.
