No, your eyes do not deceive you. Gmail grid view is already gone.

Rumors began to swirl last week that grid view was being “deprecated,” the term Google uses for projects they no longer support. People began to tweet, asking if anyone else was having trouble finding the grid view option, and the toggle disappeared from various accounts over a period of days.

"Aww, rats, @gmail killed grid view!" – Said a bunch of email marketers, because they're the only ones who even knew it existed

— Email Snarketing (@EmailSnarketing) April 17, 2015

Gmail's Grid View seems to be gone. Look for yourself.

— Daniel Deneweth (@danielrpco) April 17, 2015

Gmail took away my grid view for the promotions tab and I'm inexplicably upset. #emailmarketing #techieprobs

— Karen Hopper (@lalaforte) April 17, 2015

Kinda bummed Gmail made Grid view disappear. I dug it.

— Tim Barribeau (@tbarribeau) April 17, 2015

Now, we have something akin to official confirmation. There was no announcement, but Justin at FreshInbox got a response that, “It was an experiment [Google] decided not to pursue.”

Obviously, marketers know that Google has a history of pulling the plug on projects with little advance warning, the three year long Great Authorship Debacle being a prime example. But unlike the intricate authorship markup, the response to grid view seemed very positive among marketers, though there is little research on consumer thought.

So the question is, well, why?

One possible explanation is that it wouldn’t fit with the ecosystem Google hopes to create with Inbox by Gmail, the still-mysterious email alternative that doesn’t seem to be gaining much traction. What do you think? Does Google have something more up its sleeve?

Updated April 23, 2015 at 3:00 pm