Gmail Redesigned: modify Gmail's design

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 2, 2008
Updated • Mar 27, 2014
Email, Firefox, Firefox add-ons, Gmail
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Google likes basic designs that just work. Take a look at their search engine or Gmail to know what I mean. Now you all know that I do not have a problem with basic design because I prefer websites to be usable and speedy instead of shiny and slow.

Update: While many Google products are still designed this way, the company has made changes to several of its products or introduced new ones that don't follow this design principle anymore.

Gmail Redesigned on the other hand is too nice to be ignored. It's a userscript that turns plain old Gmail into a modern looking website that blows your mind away. All you need is the Firefox extension Greasemonkey and the userscript Gmail Redesigned. Once the extension has been installed and the userscript loaded you can visit Gmail to see the changes.

Update: Please note that the script has not been updated for a while. We have removed the link pointing to it, and suggest you check out the Google Redesigned Firefox extension instead which provides design updates for several Google products including Gmail.

The interface turned from the plain white / blue interface to a darker one that is definitely more eye pleasing. Take a look at the before and after screenshot to know what I mean.

It's interesting that development for the userscript began just two weeks ago. It's work in progress, currently two extensions, Better Gmail 2 and Remember The Milk are not compatible but the author promises to make them in future versions. And since he updates almost once a day this is surely going to be soon.

Update: As I said earlier, the script is no longer available, but has been turned into an extension for Firefox. It is maintained by the same company which created the script in first place. If you are using Firefox, this is the way to go to get a different design on Gmail and other Google product pages.

Note that Google introduced themes to Gmail recently as well, but they modify colors only. To access themes, click on the options icon in the top right corner and select themes from the context menu.

There is a dark theme available which reverts the color scheme more or less. Other themes are available, including a high contrast theme, classic themes, HD themes, and custom themes.

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Comments

  1. DropZz said on February 24, 2020 at 8:51 am
    Reply

    Firefox Containers are awesome.
    I recommend using “Multi-Account Containers” in combination with “Temporary Containers” and “First Party Isolation”.
    They are a hassle to setup at first but after that they are great.
    To make it easier you should first enable “Multi-Account Containers” and save all your relevant Accounts in them. After that you can enable the other two.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-isolation/

    1. thebrowser said on February 24, 2020 at 6:38 pm
      Reply

      What exactly is the difference between temporary containers and multi-account containers? I don’t see how they can be combined since they seem to achieve the same goal in the same way.

      First party isolation is a preference that you can disable manually from about:config so you can save one addon installation. Considering that would already make your browser fingerprint more unique and easier to track, which is the whole point of going through this trouble, is a good idea to look to reduce the number of addons like this one.

      Just my observation, not criticizing, thank you for sharing this!

      1. notanon said on February 25, 2020 at 12:39 am
        Reply

        @thebrowser, disabling first party isolation is stupid.

        First party isolation protects your privacy.

        Read about it here: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-isolation-in-firefox/

        BTW, privacy.firstparty.isolate = “true” is the default of the ghack user.js, so you don’t have to worry about leaving a unique “fingerprint”, you’ll have plenty of company (other user.js also borrow heavily from the ghack user.js).

      2. thebrowser said on February 25, 2020 at 8:26 am
        Reply

        Oops, I didn’t mean disable by toggle it, my bad. But still, what’s the difference between the first two addons? I’m really curious if there’s a benefit in using them separately.

      3. Damien said on February 25, 2020 at 4:06 pm
        Reply

        “But still, what’s the difference between the first two addons?”

        From what I understand, multi-account containers can provide permanent containers while temporary provides only temporary containers.

    2. Dav said on October 25, 2020 at 4:51 pm
      Reply

      Tried and tested it. It just does not work as intended, it’s such a pain to use and configure. Plus it is of course not integrated so if, say, I want less fingerprints with, for instance, User Agent Switcher then I need to configure it for each container which, in the case of Temporary Containers, means every and each domain…

      So, at the end, you will definitely be tracked as if you haven’t those extensions.

      This concepts should be:
      – builtin Firefox
      – usable out-of-the-box with decent default values
      – invisible to non tech users.

      If not, then it just like recommanding Tor and NetBSD to grandma.

  2. Mr. Hand said on February 24, 2020 at 8:57 am
    Reply

    Good idea, but many years overdue for me, as I already use 3 different computers for different uses and each of those has at least 2 operating systems and a VM, and I use VPNs and clear/avoid all cookies and block trackers and ads, and I don’t share accounts between systems, and more… Also, I no longer use Firefox, but good info to know, thanks.

    I’m giving you an A+ for this report.

    1. Anon said on February 24, 2020 at 9:54 am
      Reply

      @Mr. Hand: You go on great lengths to play Minecraft, I give you that.

      1. Mr. Hand said on February 25, 2020 at 7:06 am
        Reply

        @Anon

        Well, whatever you gave me, it’s retarded blather.

  3. CraigS26 said on February 24, 2020 at 11:58 am
    Reply

    I use ESET EIS Security Suite with a Banking & Payment Protection feature (Protection against KeyStroke Loggers) and the two don’t seem to mix. The Ext installs for regular FF use BUT (ie) Financial sites setup to open in a Green-bordered BPP Window don’t recognize the Containers Ext and an attempt to Install it netted Install failed-Ext appears to be corrupt.
    I’m valuing Keystroke Logging over Privacy, so I uninstalled the Ext.
    IF anyone knows how to marry the two, much appreciated by a Not-An-IT-Pro.

  4. Anonymous said on February 24, 2020 at 1:27 pm
    Reply

    What about the tracking via Localstorage?

    1. Danniello said on February 24, 2020 at 3:24 pm
      Reply

      Not good.

      Firefox is not supporting removing site localStorage per container – it means that you could remove all localStorage or nothing (for example removing youtube.com localStorage in “Default” container will also remove YouTube settings in “Google YouTube” container).

      https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/Documentation#enable-localstorage-support

    2. Anonymous said on February 24, 2020 at 4:35 pm
      Reply

      Except the type of problems Danniello wrote about, the local storage is supposed to be separated by containers, like cookies, indexedDB, HTTP data cache, image cache, and any other areas supported by originAttributes, according to this source:

      https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers#What_is_.28and_isn.27t.29_separated_between_Containers

      History, bookmarks and Security Exceptions for Invalid TLS Certificates are not separated (yet).

      Saved passwords, saved search and form data, HSTS flags and OCSP responses are not separated, on purpose.

  5. Anonymous said on February 24, 2020 at 2:40 pm
    Reply

    I’ve tried it. It’s useless for me because the history is not isolated to each containers.

    1. skierpage said on February 24, 2020 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Why do you need history isolation? Web sites don’t have access to your history.

      1. Jonas said on February 24, 2020 at 11:05 pm
        Reply

        “Web sites don’t have access to your history.”

        Actually, there used to be a hack whereby websites could sometimes infer your history regarding other sites you had previously visited. It was an evil derivation of innocent code that some web developers (including me) had implemented: custom CSS code to change the color or style of a visited link, in a different way from the default style that websites back then used for visited links.

        Unfortunately for me, after I put a lot of work into my snazzy visited-links styling, the browsers all blocked such custom styling because of the evil tracking hacks (which didn’t even exist at the time I wrote my code). I (and other developers) were furious that the browser companies didn’t implement the fix in a more fine-grained way: they should have just blocked that kind of styling on links to _other websites_, but not to links on the same site, since the site owner can log what pages you visited on his own site anyway.

        I’m not aware of any history-sniffing hacks since then, but I wouldn’t bet that it’s not possible in some other way.

      2. Anonymous said on February 25, 2020 at 6:08 am
        Reply

        @skierpage
        read gerdneuman’s comment here
        https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/47

    2. Anonymous said on February 25, 2020 at 5:35 am
      Reply

      That’s what profiles are for. Containers is about site isolation and for using multiple accounts / cookies of a site in the same profile.

  6. notanon said on February 25, 2020 at 12:56 am
    Reply

    @Ashwin, my reccommendation for your next article is DNS-over-HTTPS (Martin covered it, but he hasn’t used it & reported back about a longer-term user experience).

    IMO, everyone on Firefox should be using it (Chrome promised a general roll-out of DNS-over-HTTPS, but it hasn’t happened due to “technical issues” according to Google).

    You can add ESNI for even better results.

    And use a VPN, although, a good VPN cost money every month (whereas, DNS-over-HTTPS is free on Firefox).

    1. Ashwin said on February 25, 2020 at 8:09 am
      Reply

      Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll add it to my list.

  7. Torin Doyle said on February 29, 2020 at 5:54 pm
    Reply

    Can I have some containers with all/most addons disabled (i.e. as if they were in safe mode) and other containers with addons enabled?

  8. James said on May 12, 2020 at 4:29 am
    Reply

    I get the basics of conatiners but I don’t understand the difference between the containers that now come with Firefox, and the add-ons – why do I need the extension? Is it because I can “reopen in container” but need the add-on/extension to make sure that whenever I open a particular webpage it opens within the container?

    1. James said on May 12, 2020 at 4:32 am
      Reply

      Ah – yes – the add-on just does the job automatically each time.

  9. RandomPasserBy said on August 31, 2020 at 4:06 pm
    Reply

    A mix of uBlock and Firefox’s own tracking settings can block the vast majority of the tracking content that is fed to a page, which makes the use of containers a bit redundant unless you are looking to have multiple tabs open with different accounts logged into the same website (or service) – which I have no need for.

    That said, I having nothing against the concept of containers, just feel they are something that might have been beneficial years ago rather than now.

    What’s more, if you genuinely want to stop the tracking, you could just use a private browsers session.

  10. TelV said on September 29, 2020 at 1:10 pm
    Reply

    I’m surprised that container tabs isn’t part of the default installation yet even in the latest FF version which is 81.0 at the time of writing.

    I’m using Waterfox Classic which supports XUL/XCOM extensions and is probably regarded as old fashioned by some; yet container tabs are available in prefs without the need to install an addon. Here’s a pix.
    https://i.postimg.cc/43zKXb8K/container-tabs.png

  11. Glen Cooper said on January 8, 2022 at 7:59 pm
    Reply

    I love Firefox Containers. Started using them about a year ago. Then the screen on the laptop I set them all up on died. Setting up a new laptop now and found that they’re not carried over to a new computer, even with Sync enabled. Ugh. Revived the old laptop specifically for the purpose of figuring out how to move them over to a new computer. Haven’t figured it out yet. Beware of this limitation if you use them.

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