Gmail has always offered an odd mixture of lightning fast AJAX navigation and frustratingly slow load times, depending on what you’re doing. The worst offender, by far, is the initial load when you first open the page – sometimes the loading bar flashes by in a second, others it chooses to sluggishly crawl without any apparent intention of ever finishing. If you find yourself seeing the latter all too often, then you’re going to be quite pleased with a new Gmail Labs feature that just launched called Gmail Inbox Preview.
Inbox Preview does one very basic thing: as Gmail goes through its initial boot, it shows a plaintext version of your ten most recent message subject lines. You can’t open the messages or interact with them in any way, but it will let you quickly tell if you’ve got any new messages without having to sit through the load time. Most people on high speed internet connections probably won’t even notice the feature, but for those of us who reguarlly have to check our Email using quirky mobile connections or dial up service, it’s sure to come in handy.
To enable the feature, head to the Labs section of Gmail and look for “Inbox Preview”. Of course, if you’re a heavy Gmail user it might also be wise to check out one of the variety of Gmail notifier applications, which will automatically let you know when a new message has arrived.
Another extremely useful feature. It’s a shame we don’t see nearly half as much as innovation from the other email providers.
Yahoo Email is pretty innovative in its own way although it doesn’t apply features directly from the public-tested lab or some kind. Yahoo Email is also quick.
yup. really.
in beta since 2004. my mind tells me users are being hoaxed.
PsychicLocator.com – something tells me
OMG, do people still use Yahoo mail? Or, is it just that you work for Yahoo?
Dude, get your facts right. Yahoo! mail is still the most used email provider and also the fastest growing.
Start reading techcrunch more comprehensively.
http://www.tech...start-worrying/
For lazy people: Gmail grew 43 percent last year to 29.6 million. In contrast, the much more massive Yahoo Mail grew 11 percent to 91.9 million uniques. …. At this rate, Gmail could overtake AOL and Hotmail within the next two years. Yahoo Mail won’t be as easy to catch. Although Yahoo Mail grew only 11 percent last year, it still added more visitors (9.4 million) than Gmail (8.8 million).
It’s cute, but not really earth shattering….
Good micro innovation on their interface.
I read about this “Magic Inbox” on Lifehacker about an hour ago and the rumor was that this feature would prioritize your inbox based on who in in your social sphere, and automatically detect who your real friends are. While this “freind sphere” could be done by setting up filters (and modifying those filters any time you add a new friend), I think it would be better than this email preview functionality. Even in Ethiopia, internet speeds will soon be blazing fast with satellite up-links.
http://www.tech...il-magic-inbox/
We developed a similar subject line reader widget( for gmail on opera browser) for a competition that we didn’t participate in… ppl thought of this as a useless idea, seems like we were actually developing a feature which even google was developing at the same time…
Very cool!
I changed my settings already to let my Gmail automatically show the emails by using the basic HTML instead of loading the whole things with Ajax.
I don’t think this feature will be useful for most people… any computer I use has high speed and it takes Gmail about 3 seconds to boot up.
3 seconds!! that is slow! Try it on new Google Chrome.
niceties will continue it seems…:)
cheers,
marvin
Bogus. It doesn’t tell me the headlines of any e-mails that haven’t been sent yet. What good is it?
I wonder at this break neck speed of innovations from Gmail, do we need anything else other than Gmail at all, after 4-5 years.
For sure they have made up their mind to create a ‘huge dip’ for the competitors.
bit of a moot point when gmail is actually down again
Yahoo email is innovative but google is the best.
Load time is always about 0.5 seconds here (using chrome). Don’t see much use for this.
bug == feature
Errrr… a feature needed & invented simply because Gmail is too slow in the first place.
The bigger issue is how often Chrome refuses to open an email in Gmail when I click on it.
Building a feature to deal with a bug indeed!
MG,
Totally agree… but @ the same time, kudos to Google (from a buiness standpoint) for turning a weaknes into something positive.
By having Gmail Labs, Google is doing two things: innovating a little, and getting A LOT of word of mouth.
And that´s smart.
this feature were gr8 if u could sing off before it finish to load