Better Gmail

June 8th, 2007 at 3:00am — Rating: — Link

I've always loved Greasemonkey even though some people thought it was unsecure at one point. I continued to use it, and yes, I had a lot of GMail extension scripts installed in Greasemonkey. One of the best things that could've been done is include all of the scripts into one extension. Hmmmm....

It seems Mrs. Gina Trapani already thought of this. If that name sounds familiar, she is your blog host over at LifeHacker.com. Anyway, the Better GMail Firefox addons was created by Mrs. Trapani and combines all of the popular Greasemonkey GMail scripts into one extension.

After installing the addon, I restarted Firefox and headed over to GMail to give the addon a test run. All I can say is that based on everything I've seen, this add-on packs quite a wallop. Kudos to all of the designers/developers that added their Greasemonkey scripts to the extension as well.

The Greasemonkey scripts included in the add-on are:

• Fixed font in plain text messages
• Shrink a URL with a key combination
• Google Calendar in Folder List
• MailTo: GMail Compose Links
• Large Attachment Icons
• 3 GMail Skins: SuperClean, AirSkin, and Revisited
• Saved Searches
• and Macros

The more I start using the macros, the more I'm liking it and I immediately switched over to the SuperClean skin (very cool...oh..and clean).

I think Gina may have started something that more designers/developers should work towards. Creative individuals could examine a web site of their choice and start building an add-on that incorporates their own combination of scripts/add-ons to completely reshape a web site until it's just the way they like it, similar to the CSS Zen Garden. This would show an exceptional showmanship by a developer or designer bottled in an add-on. I understand thats the whole idea behind Greasemonkey, but take it up a notch.

Designers/developers would start combining forces to create Site Extensions like the Better Gmail add-on.

Overall, I love the Better GMail add-on. It adds a lot of additional features that should be in a future version of GMail (wink wink, nudge nudge), but until then, I'll rate the extension a 5 out of 5 and keep using it.

Excellent work, Mrs. Trapani.