Now that Gmail’s rolled out its new look and you’ve learned your way around the changes, it’s time to fix the little quirks and annoyances that remain. Here are a few of our favorite userstyles and userscripts for making the best of the Gmail redesign.
These userscripts should work in Chrome, Firefox with Greasemonkey, or Safari with Ninjakit. Chrome and Firefox users can install userstyles as userscripts from the individual styles’ page or install them with Stylish for Chrome or Stylish for Firefox, which provides one-click userstyle installation. Opera users can install userstyles as plain CSS or JavaScript from the style’s page.
Hide the “Send Feedback” Box
Certainly the most annoying thing about the new interface is its little “Send Feedback” box that always pops up in the bottom right-hand corner. Even if you click the X, it’ll show back up again later on, taunting you and making you feel powerless. Thankfully, with this simple userscript, you can banish that box from Gmail forever.
Make Threads Easier to Read with Alternating Message Colors
In the new layout, it’s a bit more difficult to tell the difference between two messages in a thread than it was in the old layout. They’re both white, and have very thin borders. To more easily differentiate between messages in a conversation, you can install the Alternating Message Colors userstyle, which will color every other message light blue. You can choose to color the odd or even messages on the userstyle’s page.
Increase the Contrast Between Read and Unread Messages
Google has also lightened a lot of the colors in this new design, meaning the difference between read and unread emails is a bit more difficult to see. If you’d like to darken the background of unread messages to more easily tell the difference, you can install the Read/Unread Contrast Increase userstyle. You can choose from two levels before installing: “A Little More” and “A Lot More”, depending on how dark you want to make the background.
Differentiate Between Toolbar Buttons with Colors
One of my biggest gripes is that the buttons in Gmail’s toolbar no longer have words on them, and the icons usually take a second to register since they’re so light. The Easy Access Colored Buttons userstyle gives each button a different color, so you can instantly tell which is the delete button, which is the label button, and so on. Of course, if you don’t like some of the colors, you can change them by fiddling with the style—I commented out a few lines with a /* because I thought certain buttons didn’t look very good colored.
Make the Toolbar Even More Compact
If you’re using the “Compact” version of Gmail’s interface and still think it wastes too much space, you can install the Gmail Compact userscript for an even more efficient layout (especially useful for netbooks and other small screens). It makes the toolbar buttons a little smaller and moves the inbox a few pixels toward the left sidebar, as seen at the right.
Make the New Scrollbar Easier to See
Lastly, if you’re using Chrome, you’ve probably noticed the new transparent scrollbars in Gmail. They can be tough to see on some themes, though, so if you’d like to make them a bit more visible, the Visible Scroll Bar userstyle will turn it a lovely shade of blue so it stands out a little more. And, if you’re not on Chrome, you can get the cool Chrome-style scrollbar with the Scrollbar Like Chrome userstyle (though you won’t be able to darken it with the first script, as it only works on Chrome).
