So I have either 6556 or 9788 contacts in my Gmail contacts address book. Why the difference? It has to do with the way the contacts are displayed, I kid you not.

I have tried to get an answer from Google. They sent me to this blog post, which unfortunately doesn’t really explain what I am observing. Yes, the new UI will no longer populate your “suggested contacts” list with people that you reply to. 

Google updated its interface for Gmail substantially last year, and since then the new UI just doesn’t work for me: it takes forever to load, crashes my browser frequently, and also has a big bug that for the life of me I don’t understand why it isn’t fixed: if you have more than 20 or so groups of contacts (I have about 50, I use this feature a lot), you can only display the first 20 in the new UI. Google could easily fix this by adding a scroll bar to the groups listing when you want to add someone to a particular group. Right now, you can’t scroll down past the first 20 group names.

Here are screenshots showing you before (below) and after the new UI is turned on (at left), and the relevant numbers of contacts displayed.

I asked Google to explain this. Still waiting a response.