Use the classic Gmail interface. It throws out all the Hangouts and G+ stuff and, for me at least, loads twice as fast. I've had it as my default for a while now. But you still get the advantage of Gmail's spam filter and image display.

For what it's worth, I do enjoy the full mobile Gmail client, though. The tabs are actually useful to me there because I can easily control how I get push notifications (only for Primary tab emails).