I ran across an interesting article listing 10 Gmail interface tweaks available when using Firefox and I found them interesting enough to try out. After installing and testing each script I found a couple of them worth passing on.
These tweaks are actually GreaseMonkey scripts that you install and run in Firefox, and that only run when you are viewing and interacting with Gmail. So, if you aren’t a Firefox user (shame on you!) then this might be a neat introduction into what’s possible with Firefox plug-ins. The article gives a nice description of GreaseMonkey and what it is used for at the top of the list, so no need to repeat that here.
For the most part, I only found a couple of the scripts to be useful to me personally, and are my diamonds in the rough from the article:
#3: Label Folders – This does a fantastic job of displaying sub-labels as drill-down folders making it much easier to find things.
#4: One Click Conversations – I dig the pop-up that this script gives you with some info on the author of the email, and one-click ability to access all emails from the sender.
The others were either useless to me, or I just didn’t like the implementation. For instance, 1, 2, 6 and 8 in the list are just small interface customizations that didn’t really do anything for me, and didn’t seem worth the extra overhead of having to run the script when the page is rendered. These scripts can slow download times significantly depending on which ones you have installed and how many you have installed since each script has to run on page load.
Some people might like number 9 depending on how you use Gmail. This script adds the ability to assign different colors to each label. This can help you pick out particular labels in a list of emails on the screen.
The last one, number 10, provides some keyboard macros for interacting with Gmail, but they conflicted with macros I already had in place from other plug-ins. Assuming you have multiple productivity plug-ins installed you might experience the same thing.
Bonus Tip: Unrelated to Gmail, I discovered this yesterday on the Firefox Blog. You can specify multiple Home Page links in the Firefox options by separating each link with a pipe ‘|’. This will open Firefox with a tab per link. I found this pretty helpful since I usually start each day with a few web-based applications, and don’t typically open that many new instances of Firefox during the day. If you tend to open a new instance of Firefox frequently, this will be a drag because it will open each tab every time.
Gmail Interface Tweaks in Firefox
I ran across an interesting article listing 10 Gmail interface tweaks available when using Firefox and I found them interesting enough to try out. After installing and testing each script I found a couple of them worth passing on.
These tweaks are actually GreaseMonkey scripts that you install and run in Firefox, and that only run when you are viewing and interacting with Gmail. So, if you aren’t a Firefox user (shame on you!) then this might be a neat introduction into what’s possible with Firefox plug-ins. The article gives a nice description of GreaseMonkey and what it is used for at the top of the list, so no need to repeat that here.
For the most part, I only found a couple of the scripts to be useful to me personally, and are my diamonds in the rough from the article:
#3: Label Folders – This does a fantastic job of displaying sub-labels as drill-down folders making it much easier to find things.
#4: One Click Conversations – I dig the pop-up that this script gives you with some info on the author of the email, and one-click ability to access all emails from the sender.
The others were either useless to me, or I just didn’t like the implementation. For instance, 1, 2, 6 and 8 in the list are just small interface customizations that didn’t really do anything for me, and didn’t seem worth the extra overhead of having to run the script when the page is rendered. These scripts can slow download times significantly depending on which ones you have installed and how many you have installed since each script has to run on page load.
Some people might like number 9 depending on how you use Gmail. This script adds the ability to assign different colors to each label. This can help you pick out particular labels in a list of emails on the screen.
The last one, number 10, provides some keyboard macros for interacting with Gmail, but they conflicted with macros I already had in place from other plug-ins. Assuming you have multiple productivity plug-ins installed you might experience the same thing.
Bonus Tip: Unrelated to Gmail, I discovered this yesterday on the Firefox Blog. You can specify multiple Home Page links in the Firefox options by separating each link with a pipe ‘|’. This will open Firefox with a tab per link. I found this pretty helpful since I usually start each day with a few web-based applications, and don’t typically open that many new instances of Firefox during the day. If you tend to open a new instance of Firefox frequently, this will be a drag because it will open each tab every time.
Enjoy!