Gmail Finally Appeases The Tab Addicts With A Dynamic Unread Count Favicon

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

I have a confession to make: I’m completely and utterly addicted to browser tabs. It’s a sickness. I might have 15 or 20 or more open in each window at any given time. That’s why I love Chrome. The ability to pin tabs is a life-saver by way of being a space-saver. But there’s always been one big downside.

When you pin a tab in Chrome, all you see is the favion. That means you lose the title of the tab itself. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, but for apps like Gmail, Twitter, and Tumblr that show unread counts in this area, it’s actually an annoyance. As a result, I’ve had to install extensions just to be able to see when I have new messages. Not anymore.

Google has just launched a small, but awesome new feature in Gmail Labs: Unread message icon. With in enabled, you’re Gmail favicon will change in realtime to display the number of unread messages in your account window.

Google notes that this feature will only work Chrome 6 and above and Firefox 2 and above. In other words, everyone who will care about such a thing should be able to use it. To enable it, simply go to the Labs area in Settings and turn it on and save.

One other small thing: it appears to only count messages that are deemed “important” if you’re using Priority Inbox. But that’s just fine by me.

Thank you, Google. Now we just need this for Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Quora.

Product: Gmail
Website: gmail.com
Company Google

Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service provided by Google which has innovative features such as “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface, and plenty of free storage (almost 7.7GB). Gmail opened in private beta mode in April 2004 by invitation only. At first, invites were hard to come by and were spotted up for sale on auction sites like eBay. The email service is now open to everyone and is part of Google Apps. ...

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