Friday 20 April 2012

Gfail (and how to fix it)

As we all know, hate is the only legitimate emotion on the internet...

I really hate that Gmail has the audacity to assume it deserves two thirds of the screen width. Generally, I like to keep windows narrow, and normally that's fine. But noooo, Gmail is better than other webpages. Gmail is special...

The problem is, when I shrink the Gmail window down below a certain width, it decides to hide the vertical scroll bar... Google... It's a scroll bar... how could you fuck it up? They found a way!

Since I already use AdBlock* I was seeing a massively annoying empty white bar on the right of my emails, making it even more annoying that Gmail chooses to hide the scroll bar when I tried to shrink the window to remove this wasted space. Seriously... It's a fucking scroll bar! Why...

Anyway, the solution is to install the Minimalist App*, which lets you conveniently 'Hide Sidebar'. This removes all that crap on the right hand side of your emails, reclaiming about one third of the width of the Gmail window for, you know, THE CONTENT OF THE FUCKING EMAIL!!!

You can also hide all that +1 crap that they force down your throat too, and a bunch of other annoying stuff. It's really a great App!

Of course all this will break when Google decide that their current design isn't hogging enough of your screen as it is, but hopefully it can be repaired quickly by nice people like the authors of the above Apps. 


Thank you!

* Wow, I really hate that 'overlay' design on the Chrome Web Store!