I had no idea Chrome had that "pin tabs" feature until I read this blog post. My tab bar is suddenly a lot neater without the ever-present Gmail/HN/SO occupying as much space as the stuff I'm actively working on.
It used to be that you couldnt SOMETHING-w to close a pinned tab. If you did that, it would just gray out and when you clicked on it, it reopened in at the same location.
Now, it has to stay open, you can close w/o taking extra actions and it is always using memory for the full page.
I tell you all of this so hopefully you can imagine how much better it used to be and I can add you to the campaign to get the old behavior back.
For a while there the persistent-but-closed state of pinned tabs was coming in and out randomly for me (based on updates on whichever repository I was on).
I agree, the old behavior of having a dual-state pinned tab was VERY nice. I pretty much always have three pinned tabs now (GMail, GMail, GReader), but it used to be a few more. Now if I close GReader, which I do if I'm focusing down on working and know I won't be hitting it, it disappears - instead of that little placeholder.
I've been hoping re-enabling that behavior it was an option I just missed somewhere. I guess not.
Love the pin feature! Also note, anything you install via the web store can be configured to always open in a pinned tab by clicking on the little wrench when you hover over the app icon. For me it's Mail, Calendar and Grooveshark. Why would I ever close them?
Tooltips take about 2 seconds to show on mouse-over. If you had to do it all the time to figure out which account you're looking/peeking at, you'd go nuts.
Yeah, that's one of the most valuable tips I got from the whole GTD thing: stop your email client notifying you when new email arrives. Productive email is asynchronous.
Closing it down is best, but when I accidentally leave it open I still don't want the message count visible. In addition to enabling the Labs feature to turn off the inbox count in the web UI, I also have a one-line Greasemonkey script to remove it from the document/tab title.
I actually have a filter that marks all my incoming mail as "read" precisely to avoid this problem. It might seem heavy-handed, but this solution works even when working inside Gmail itself.
This just in: cloud services discover biff(1). Within a few years we should have an OS.
Sorry to be cynical, it pains me to see the whole state of computing thrown out the window everytime we reinvent new paradigms (none of which add substantial value).
Hint: we'll progress when we start building over old assets, not reinventing them at every "guerre de clocher".
EDIT: actually, it might or might not be based on it, but that code shows how to implement dynamic favicons, at least for Google Chrome.
Another edit: MikeCapone observed in another comment that it only goes up to "30+" so they might just be using 30 static images. But if so, why that wouldn't work in browsers other than Chrome 6+ and Firefox 2+ is beyond me.
Surely it would be cached based on the image URL though, not based on the page URL, and different images could use different URLs. I still don't see how this would pose a problem.
What I really want is something that can cause the icon to change when I get new chat messages. I frequently find myself unable to hear the soft incoming message sound, because I'm listening to something louder, and it would be nice to have a visual indicator.
I have none. I have a complex series of filters which direct mailing lists, automated emails, etc into separate labels which bypass the inbox. If it makes it to my inbox, it's important enough to be read quickly -- this generally means only about 50-100 emails a day.
Wow. 50-100? I filter down to less than 10 a day. Either I'm much more aggressive with my filtering or you are far more of an important person than I am.
In addition to my normal commit and mailing filters, I set up one filter called "Non-direct" that's effectively "something that's not addressed directly to me and doesn't fall under any other filter." That means that the only things that show up in my inbox are emails directly relevant to me.
It turns out I only get around 5 personal e-mails a day out of the 100+ I actually get. Which could be read either way :).
I NEVER have more than 5 unread messages in my inbox. I have TONS that get filtered and archived to various labels but those are all mailing lists etc. But my inbox never has more than 5 unread messages and maybe 2-3 deal with soon messages.
Unless of course I go on vacation and then I have an hour or two to get back to NORMAL.
I user Gmail's "Priority In-box" feature and my priority section never has more than 5-10. Sometimes I let the other part get a little unruly when I am busy. I did use the option to add a section for "unread" messages before the rest of the mailbox.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I think there are quite a few of us who have at least a thousand unread messages. I have all kind of git commit messages that show up in my inbox that I don't always mark as read, not to mention all the mailing lists I subscribe to that aren't all in filters....
It's great, I actually wanted this thing since I use pin tab all of the time for Gmail, but I dislike that it displays a number even if you have an empty inbox too.
I don't like seing a 0, it should have defaulted to the normal icon. I try to keep my inbox as short as possible and I label a lot so having an empty inbox is expected.
Huzzah, now I don't need this extension to do this for me. Rather off topic, but I really wish one day that gmail (@gmail.com and custom domains) supported multiple logins from the same window, I have Opera installed just for company email.
They support it, although it is tricky to set up and it sometimes gets confused if you have to sign into ancillary Google services with your secondary account.
I am always signed into my personal account in one pinned tab and my apps account in another. The secret is in the gmail URL, specifically the /u/0/ in the URL. It turns out you can switch the number and be able to sign in multiple times. This may only work after you have enabled the multiple sign on that you can find with a quick search.
What do you hate about it? I like the idea, but I find it to be buggy and incomplete. Not all of the Google services work with it yet, mobile versions of their sites don't seem to support it at all, etc. If/when that's solved, I think it'll be an improvement over having multiple browsers open.
For instance, I'm normally logged into my personal account, which uses Mail, Voice, Calendar and more. To use Mail with my work account, my current account in every service is changed, so my Voice Chrome extension no longer shows correct data, as well as other weirdnesses that I've blocked from my memory since I started using incognito windows instead.
I have three accounts in the same window, I can switch which one I use currently by clicking on the email address. Two of them are Google Apps accounts, and one is a Gmail account.
It doesn't seem to work for me, I can only use my gmail accounts, those using custom domains don't have mail "enabled" but if I login to them alone they work fine. Maybe it's a problem at my end then!
When did you sign up for the google apps account? I've seen this issue with new google apps accounts because google now has all google app accounts also set up as a regular google account for other google services. For example - before if you had a google apps account for your business, but wanted to use a service like google voice - you had to sign in to google voice with a separate google account. Now Google Apps allows you to use your custom domain to sign into all google services. I've seen this conflict in setting up newer Google Apps accounts for customers because the Google Apps account is treated as traditional Google Account. I'm sure there has to be some sort of work around for this.
Also, seems to be an issue - this number does not increase (from 0 to 1 in the test I did) when you 'mark as unread'. Tried to give feedback about this to gmail labs but couldn't.
They don't have a lab feature for HTML5 Desktop Notifications, but you can build extensions utilizing it. Here is one I built to show notifications for gmail chat messages:
I don't know the grandparent's reasoning, but for me, having a small 0 there means I loose the peripheral vision effect of the icon. That little glowing "0" is hard to distinguish from another number in quick glance. If there were no icon then I could quickly determine the most important piece of information to me - do I have mail or not?
Screenshot of the "0" and "2" from two Gmail tabs I have open side by side:
I tend to keep my inbox fully read. It's my staging area - Unread = totally unprocessed, Read = TODO, Starred = Deferred TODO or important later. For me, a quick glance for unread (any amount) is more useful than exactly how many.
Very handy feature to have, I had been keeping an eye on the pinned tabs - they flash/pulse when the page updates (new email comes in), now it's a lot easier.
It would be cool if we could interact with the app via the tab. Example: I'm in another tab and can right click the pinned Pandora tab to pause the music.
