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.