Show HN: Official Release of Gmelius, A Better Gmail in Chrome, Firefox & Opera | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Official Release of Gmelius, A Better Gmail in Chrome, Firefox & Opera

gmelius.com

48 pointsxpressyoo65 comments

All I see is "Gmail™, Gmelius™, Gmail™, Gmail™, Gmelius™, Gmail™". Is it really necessary to put a symbol next to them everytime in every paragraph? The whole page is littered with ™ symbols. I find it difficult to read with all this, but maybe it's just me who's picky.

Aside from this, I see a lot of potential for a great plugin, but all those features Gmelius claims to remove since they are annoying, are features I like. And all the things Gmelius adds to Gmail, are stuff I couldn't care less for.

This plugin is really not appealing to me and I think it's because, to me at least, Gmail is simply great and there is pretty much nothing to add except maybe enable a few Labs options. It seems to me that this plugin is really useless because there is practically nothing to change to Gmail to make it great in my opinion.

There's a few things to object to in the plugin (like a comment below I find that removing ads together with asking for donations a very distasteful combo), but honestly, what value does your comment add except trying to put down the authors?

There are ways to critique something without calling it "really useless".

I'm giving my honest opinion and I'm saying that I really love Gmail the way it is without any extra plugin. I think it's feedback that matters to the authors, maybe they will find that some of their potential user base find no added value in their plugin and they will try to come up with other features that will attract users such as me.

> there is practically nothing to change to Gmail to make it great in my opinion.

Sounds like you're not even a member of their potential user base if you're already happy with the Gmail interface.

Well it's a product that I use every day and I'm always eager to try new stuff if I see it could be cool. I was really interessed by the article and headed to the website to see what it offered, and I felt it wasn't a plugin that would suit me. There is always place for improvement, even if I think Gmail is great as it is right now.

Sometimes, you're so used to a certain interface that you don't even know you can improve it until someone comes at you with something new and say "look, here's a new feature we thought you'd like : " and you go "yeah! why didn't I think of this first?".

Free feedback on a new product is incredibly valuable. I am sure the Gmelius team would prefer to receive and iterateon critical feedback from the target demographic early, over rah rah cheerleading into a flopped major launch.

I agree that feedback is massively valuable. However, there are different ways to express said feedback. In general I find the tone at HN quite colloquial, and calling something "really useless" felt unnecessarily harsh.

> There are ways to critique something without calling it "really useless".

Words that needed to be said, thank you for doing so.

@Khao: Tone is critical when giving sincere opinion. Moreover, tone is hard to convey through text. I believe you should choose your words more carefully. Your post (to me) is somewhat fussy.

At least as of right now, the marks are only on the google-owned trademarks (i.e. on "Gmail" but not on "Gmelius"). I assume the guy wants to make sure he can't be sued for trademark infringement.

No, Gmelius has the trademark symbol too, with a couple of exceptions (the "What is it?" and "Gmelius Users" boxes).

Can't they just place something in the footer saying "Gmail and all the logo/name/whatever is trademark of google and whatever". I know nothing of this kind of legal stuff, but I remember seeing places where there were only notices in the footer but they were not repeated all over the page.

They are on the GMelius logo at the top of the page as well.

Yeah. And they haven't even noticed that 'Remove the "People Widget"' is in Gmail settings.

@zalew, the current option you're mentioning in Gmail settings does not allow to regain the space at the right of your msg used by the ads. Gmelius does it.

maybe I don't get it because I use Rapportive.

IMO there's not much that can be 'fixed' in Gmail, but I see a lot of room for tweaks & customizing in G+, maybe you could try to enter this field (like there was that Facebook extension to kill annoying elements in GUI)?

It does, if you're a paying customer and don't have ads.

I find it distasteful, perhaps even unethical, to encourage removal of ads from ad-supported services.

Google offers substantial functionality in exchange for the opportunity to show its users ads.

What I find makes it slightly worse is they're asking for donations.

The main risk of advertising is that it will be ignored. It comes with the territory.

Surely you're not equating "removed" with "ignored" right?

In this case, yes, since it's an extension available for individual users to install. I don't see much of a distinction between removed/ignored if it's a personal preference. For example, it would be wrong of my postman to discard advertising flyers for everyone on his route, but please don't tell me that I'm unethical for immediately discarding them simply because they help subsidize low postage rates.

Systematically preventing consideration of all ads is quite different than the natural risk that a given ad could be ignored.

That's interesting. If you DVR a show do you feel obliged to sit through the commercials? This feels somewhat similar.

TV either comes over public airwaves, or through a cable service that I pay (a lot) for.

So no, I don't feel obligated to sit through commercials.

My GMail account, on the other hand, is a great service provided directly to me. The ads on it are well done and don't interfere with my usage. Sometimes I even see ads I click on, since they are interesting. Seems like a good deal.

Broadcast is forced into your home over public wavespace, yes. But cable is something you signed up for, and ads are part in for the deal, like Gmail. You are paying Comcast, not the content producer of the channel you watch. A better argument against cable is that it's a monopoly product, so you feel entitled to renegotiate against the anticompetitive agreement that got cable in you neighborhood.

Given that my DVR is 1) provided by that same cable company, and 2) rather awful (5 years old, and yet still the newest model available), I still don't have any sympathy.

The ad-supported model is robust enough to still work without 100% attention of the audience. Side conversations, bathroom breaks, fast forwarding, not reading every ad, not clicking on every ad, etc are all very different than systematically eliminating ads from any possibility of consideration.

Isn't this similar though? You could argue "Well, only a couple of % of Gmail users at best will use the service. Google will be just fine in the big picture". I'm actually impressed that several people objected to removing an ad-supported revenue stream.

Distasteful, or maybe imprudent, sure, but I don't think it's unethical. When I signed up for Gmail, ads weren't part of the bargain.

"Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. After all, Gmail has: Lots of space. Over 7538.321890 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."

If just using the service obliges me to view the ads, doesn't it also oblige me to click on the ads? If I don't, I'm lowering the efficiency of their ad network, and thus the value of their advertising product. Maybe I'm even obliged to buy some of the stuff advertised?

That seems crazy to me. They didn't mention the ads when I signed up, so I just don't care. I don't owe them my attention any more than they owe me customer support.

Two questions my dad would have if I showed this to him:

- How do I pronounce this?

- What does "poly-browser extension" mean?

It doesn't matter that it's cross-browser or even that it's an extension. Those are descriptions of the technical architecture. What matters is how it makes my life better: it improves Gmail by getting rid of ads, etc.

Perhaps my dad isn't your target audience. But it might be worth testing an alternate design that includes more accessible copy.

I read it as G+melius /dʒiˑˈmɛliˌ(j)əs/, roughly like Gmail+ius /dʒiˑˈmeɪɫˌjəs/.

i think you missed his point..

What, because I used IPA? You can’t reliably describe a pronunciation in many other ways.

I read the original as an indirect question.

Will anyone be able to pronounce this?

I’m not sure how much it matters. People mispronounce “Imgur” all the time, yet it’s still widely used.

G[melius] to pronounce like Gmail+ius. "melius": better in latin.

Can Google come after you in any way for disabling ads? I would think that you are in the clear, otherwise AdBlocker would not exist, but I could be wrong.

The "icons for attachments" is the killer feature for me and would install an extension only for that. It will really save me time. Cheers!

edit: can you remove the button? It does nothing but provide short-cuts to options and update (which I don't really get since extensions auto-update). I know I can hide it, but it would be better (IMO) to include the link to settings/donate somewhere in gmail.

You Gmelius, probably not, since ads are a private contract EULA thing, not a public law thing. You the user, if Google got desperate and tone-deaf, and an additional agreement were actually in the EULA.

Is there a source for this? I'm not sure how to view source of extensions.

I'm sure nothing bad happens, I just wanted to see how some of what you do is achieved. I wanted to make a similar extension for myself for browsing HN. Cheers.

https://github.com/xpressyoo/gmelius

I found it curious that this repo only contains the Chrome extension, but not the Firefox extension.

I'm happy with the existing GMail UI, and the fact that people are experimenting with custom modifications is a good thing. It's disturbing though, that the first improvement touted is the removal of ads. For a free service offered by an an advertising company, the GMail ads are about as unobtrusive as they could be. And hiding the ads doesn't do anything for privacy concerns. If it's ad-free email you're after, you really should be looking to pay for the service from someplace else.

My biggest gripe with Gmail is the lack of any ability to customize font sizes for different sections. I'm on an 11" Macbook Air and fonts can be unbearably small at times, but I see no way to increase the font-size of the emails I read. Even hitting cmd+ doesn't do the trick; the fonts get a little bigger but the whole layout goes pear shaped, of course. More granular control over font sizes would make this plugin a lot more valuable to me.

Maybe you could play with Custom.css ? http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3878589

Or different machines! Try browsing with multiple inbox on a 27" and then switch to your Air!

Here's what will make me use this: Keyboard shortcuts for everything, including text-styling when composing a message. I want to be able to use 100% of GMail's functionality without ever touching the mouse. If your product would do that, and work well and not have any big issues, I'd pay $50 for it.

Looks great but please don't remove the ads. I dislike ads as much as the next person but it should not be the role of this plugin to remove them, if you really don't want ads people can find another way to do that but it seems wrong to bundle it in with this.

Hey, as already emphasized, all the features can be enabled/disabled in the extension's preferences. You're of course perfectly free to not remove the ads.

And I understand this, it doesn't make it any less distasteful...

Gmail ads are PPC (right?). If you never C, there is no harm in blocking. If Gmail delivered valuable ads, I wouldn't want to adblock. I use Gmail and promote it and I adblock. People with money to spend on overpriced coffee use Gmail with my encouragement and click ads. Everyone wins.

"Experiment Gmail™ without ads"

Experience?

I like the part about the same font across emails, so I tried to mirror that :P

Found this http://blog.affirmix.com/2012/01/20/change-the-font-size-of-...

for Linux, default path is ~/.config/chromium/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css (Chromium) or ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css (Chrome)

I don't know css, but it seems adding color:#<color_in_hex> makes all the text have that same color.

You should use "color:inherit !important;" in order for your tweak to be applied and adapted to the Gmail theme you're using. The CSS selector should look like : ".ii.gt.adP.adO font{}"

Thank you

Dear HN community, Gmelius developer here. Thanks for your comments, please keep them coming.

Just to precise one point: every Gmelius feature can be enabled or disabled in the preferences of the extension.

The UI modifications are great. Finally, someone else is providing UI features that should have been there by default in Gmail.

I would pay for a GMail extension that allowed me to automate or semi-automate actions upon some kind of matching... e.g.

When I get an email from so-and-so... Scrape some data from email Add as a new row in Google Spreadsheet Reply with this data inserted or my own manual edits

Are commercial GMail add ins permitted?

Are commercial GMail add ins permitted?

Convert to Google Apps (there's a free plan) and you get a full marketplace: https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

Looks like the HN community on the Pacific coast is going to miss the official release of Gmelius (http://gmelius.com).

Fair enough and thx to you all who checked it out!

I would not use this for 2 reasons

1. I love consider including. It's great 2. I don't know how this affect rapportive

If you have a feature to enable/disable tweeks. Then It would be awesome

You can enable or disable any of the tweaks. All disabled by default.

Wow. Then it'll be great.

Hi HN, thanks for your valuable comments. Please do not hesitate to keep them coming, proposing features/tweaks you would like implemented in your Gmail. Florian (Gmelius Developer)

Gmail should borrow two features from this - Attachment Icons and Auto-Scroll to top of inbox.

Been using this for a while! Thanks! I love the labels with icons.

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