14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile browsing is becoming more and more widespread thanks to faster wireless speeds, greater coverage but also, in no small part, smaller and more powerful portable devices. One such device that has taken the world by storm is the netbook, packing a standard, albeit underpowered, computer in a very small form factor. But with the small size comes a small screen making web content sometimes look crowded. Google is taking a step in fixing this with a new feature for Gmail currently in Labs.
Faced with the small screen and the small resolution, netbook owners would sometimes struggle to read the subject lines in Gmail as they were moved largely outside of the screen by the new label design introduced recently. While a very useful feature by itself, the labels would be positioned in front of the subject lines making them hard to read especially in emails with more than one label.
“Now, there are some ways to work around this, like using Google Chrome's full screen mode, but I wanted a way to do more. So I created a new Gmail Labs feature called "Remove Labels from Subjects" that automatically hides the labels from messages in your inbox, leaving plenty of space for the messages' subjects,“ Christopher Semturs, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
The new feature is accessible in the Labs tab under the Settings section with the self-explanatory name “Remove Labels from Subjects.” It works just as you'd expect by completely removing the labels that normally sit in front of the subject line in the emails list. This saves quite a bit of screen real estate, which is especially useful on the small portable devices.
Google also suggests using Chrome's full-screen feature to make the most of the small screens but that piece of advice holds for any browser really, as they all have a similar feature, with Chrome actually being the only major browser to lack the functionality until recently. While the new feature in Gmail may be useful, for the time being Google has much bigger plans for notebooks with the upcoming Chrome OS.