Gmail is Google’s golden child, but it isn’t perfect. It’s full of numerous user interface elements you don’t necessarily want or need, and there’s no way to turn them off. Gmelius offers you a way out of ads, the people bar and more while also making Gmail easier to navigate. It’s a great extension, it’s free, and it can dramatically improve your experience in less than a minute.
Gmail is amazing. It’s chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn’t even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail.
This extension adds favicons — those little icons you see in your address bar when you visit a page — to Google’s search results so you can more easily see what site each link is coming from.
Despite the increase in the variety of ways you can consume media and learn about news, Google Reader is still the default news reader for many. While you can always find a good desktop RSS reader to suit your needs, many people still prefer the plain old web experience. Just because you prefer the web app doesn’t mean you can’t overhaul the look and feel though, so let’s take a look at some of the best extensions, styles and tweaks you can use to make the experience better.
Firefox/Chrome: Google Contacts needs some work, while Google+ Circles in Gmail was supposed to give you quick access to the people you interact with most, but isn’t terribly useful. That’s where ToutApp comes in — its new Gmail plugin creates a “Relationships” view where you can see the people you email often, a “Groups” view that automatically creates mini project teams after you feed it a couple of emails, and it can even track the emails you send and let you know when the recipient opens them, no return receipt required.
The new Google+ layout is pretty nice, but if you’re looking at it on a widescreen monitor it adds a lot of whitespace. If you’d like to cut down on that whitespace and centre everything, Whitespace Remover for Google Plus is a Chrome and Firefox extension that does just that.
If you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Dropbox installed, you can now upload files just by dragging them onto the Dropbox webapp.
Multiple monitors can be great for keeping an eye on multiple Firefox windows — whether you’re researching, writing, or just tracking a few downloads — and a new extension called Monitor Master adds a bunch of dual monitor-centric features that make Firefox easier to use on more than one screen.
Do a few of your favourite sites refuse to properly load in your favourite browser? Whether you’re in love with Firefox or Chrome it seems like you’ll always run into a few pages that refuse to render properly or you want to use an extension on. Switch is a simple menu bar app for Macs that lets you automatically open any tab in another browser with one click.
We regularly test the four most popular browsers for speed, but what about battery life? If you’re on a laptop, an extra 20 minutes can make a pretty big difference. Weblog 7Tutorials did a battery life test of each browser, and found that Internet Explorer was the most likely to give you a noticeable battery boost.
