Gmail Unread Messages Icon Now in Labs

Gmail Labs continues to be a great place for small features that make a lot of difference. The latest addition is a dynamic Gmail favicon which displays the unread messages count. You can already see how many new emails you have in page title, but if you have too many tabs or use the Pin Tab feature in Chrome or the App Tab one in Firefox 4, this new Labs experiment comes in very handy.

"When you’re visiting sites other than Gmail, it’s easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window," Manu Cornet, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use Chrome’s 'Pin Tab' feature that hides everything except the tab’s icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs," he explained.

"If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you may like the new Unread message icon we just added to Gmail Labs. It embeds the number of unread messages you have right into the Gmail icon itself," he announced.

If you need to keep an eye on your Gmail account and you have it open all the time then this simple feature should prove quite useful. Note that the feature only works in Chrome 6 or above and in Firefox 2 or newer.

To enable the feature, just visit the Labs tab in the Gmail Settings. You can also click on the small Labs icon if you have other experiments activated.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see the "Unread message icon" experiment. Click "Enable," then "Save Changes" and you're done.

Alternatively, you could just search for the new experiment via the brand new Labs search feature. Labs search was introduced very recently, incidentally, with help from the same developer that created "Unread message icon."