I just found a great Firefox extension while browsing Lifehacker, a small addon that will add a bar in place of the default, quite unuseful bar, and let you access features in other Google services right there.
iGoogleBar ads the favicons of many Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Reader, even Documents, Notebook and Web Albums. What makes it really cool though is that you can access features from the bar, via a drop down menu. Clicking the calendar will yield a list of event and things to do, found in your calendar.
The unread emails and unread Reader items count is especially useful, you now only need to visit these services when you know there’s something to see. Yes, there are other ways to navigate easily other productive plugins and desktop applications that can show you unread mail for example, but this is unobtrusive, replaces something less useful, so even if you use it only now and again it may be worth the download.
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