November 24, 2006

Preview Gmail Conversations

Mihai Parparita from Google created a brilliant Greasemonkey script last year. The script lets you right-click on a Gmail conversation and get a preview in a bubble. This way, you can read your mails faster, especially if you only want to read some of them.


The new Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail have a reading pane where you can preview your messages, but that takes a lot of space. This solution has the advantage that it's available on demand.

I know this is far from being new, but I've always wanted this feature in Gmail.

Greasemonkey details:
You need to have Greasemonkey in Firefox or Trixie in IE
Then install the script
at

11 comments:

  1. Luca FilighedduNovember 24, 2006 at 2:16 PM

    I was really looking forward to it, but as soon as you start using it, you realize it's, unfortunately, full of bugs...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex ChituNovember 24, 2006 at 3:13 PM

    Can you name some of them?

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 24, 2006 at 6:07 PM

    Why no userjs for Opera?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alex ChituNovember 25, 2006 at 1:59 AM

    Normally, the script should work in Opera natively. But this one doesn't seem to work, at least in Opera 9.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousNovember 27, 2006 at 10:45 AM

    yes, bugs!
    I was really excited about this, but as with most (if not all) geesemonkey scripts i've used with gmail, it craps out after the auto-refresh. with this preview script, after the re-fresh it would preview the message below the one that i would click. made worthless to me. did i do something wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alex ChituNovember 27, 2006 at 11:05 AM

    Jay, this is the only bug I've seen, but I didn't find it very important (I don't receive hundreds of mails per hour). You can always refresh mails manually.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousNovember 27, 2006 at 7:50 PM

    lonut Alex. Chitu
    "You can always refresh mails manually."

    Doesn't that negate the Ajax-brilliance of Gmail?

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousNovember 30, 2007 at 3:12 AM

    It doesn't work, i downloaded greasemonkey and installed this script, but when i press the right mouse button on a message , i see only the firefox's right click menu and not a preview of the message.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Alex ChituNovember 30, 2007 at 4:32 AM

    The script doesn't work with the new version of Gmail. You can either go back to the old version of Gmail (change the language setting from US English to UK English) or wait until the script is updated (you'll find the new URL here).

    ReplyDelete
  10. ken campbellDecember 28, 2007 at 6:04 PM

    Hi - I'm using IE7, put Trixie on no problem, but when trying to install the preview script, I am getting the following Script Host error:
    Script: gmail=-conversation-preview.user[1].js
    Line:21
    Char:1
    Error:Syntax Error
    Code: 800A03EA
    Source: Microsoft JScript Compilation Error

    Any ideas....?

    Ken

    ReplyDelete
  11. ken campbellDecember 28, 2007 at 6:04 PM

    Hi - I'm using IE7, put Trixie on no problem, but when trying to install the preview script, I am getting the following Script Host error:
    Script: gmail=-conversation-preview.user[1].js
    Line:21
    Char:1
    Error:Syntax Error
    Code: 800A03EA
    Source: Microsoft JScript Compilation Error

    Any ideas....?

    Ken

    ReplyDelete

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