Gmail Labs ho-hum, sticking with Greasemonkey scripts for now

Gmail Labs came out this week and despite all the blogging attention to it I found that the initial features are nothing to be excited about.

Oohh. I get different stars now! And I get to play snake! U-huh.

Ok, the E-mail Addict feature might be useful and I know one particular user who is excited about it. But I don’t know. Why would I want to lock myself out of e-mail? Me? An e-mail addiction problem? I don’t think so. E-mail is for old people.

Anyhow, the initial features coming out of Gmail Labs aren’t anything I find useful yet. I’m sticking with good ol’ Greasemonkey scripts and while there are a ton of available scripts out there for Gmail, here are my favorite ones:

Multi-login – I think this is my favorite Gmail Greasemonkey hack. It replaces the Sign Out link on the top right with a pull-down for your other Gmail accounts. For you OS X peeps out there, think of it as fast-user switching for your Gmail accounts.

De-ad Gmail — Ok, so it can be fun to see what Google bots think about you based on the types of e-mails you write and receive, but for the most part, they just take up space. This script gets rid of the text ads and increases space available for your message. I know it’s not nice to remove ads from an ad-supported application like Gmail but hey, I’m immune to those ads anyway so it’s not like I’m costing Google any clicks.

Mail 2 Gmail — This one automatically directs “mailto” links to Gmail instead of your default e-mail client. Very useful if you exclusively use the web-based version of Gmail.

Click here for more Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail.