Presumably all Gmail users who are also using Firefox already have the Gmail Manager extension. If you don’t, you’re missing out on some good tweaks. You can get it here.

Gmail Manager is a straightforward extension. Better Gmail, on the other hand, is a compilation of a number of Greasemonkey scripts that were written by various folks to enable a variety of tweaks to the Gmail interface. I’m not a Greasemonkey fan, for reasons that don’t matter here. When Better Gmail was released through LifeHacker, however, I thought I’d give it a try.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about what this collection offers. I’ll merely say that it installs like any other extension, and gives you a bunch of hitherto unavailable options: using html in signatures, adding various items to the sidebar menu (and getting rid of that annoying spam link), forcing encrypted (https) connections, fixed fonts for reading mail (with a Fx tweak in about:config — change the “font.name.serif.x-western” value to your choice), choosing whether the signature appears above or beneath quotes, a clumsy but workable way to use folders instead of labels, alternate skins that work with “Gmail Skins” if you’re still using it, and a number of other cool — if not especially necessary — features that you’ll have to discover for yourself.

There are a couple of issues involving other scripts, explained on the site, that shouldn’t bother anyone but power users. I’ve been using Better Gmail for about three weeks (I use Gmail exclusively for email) and have found it useful, reasonably easy to figure out, and trouble-free.

Caveat: if you do have problems, address them to the Better Gmail Page. Don’t bother to post questions here in a comment, because I won’t be able to help you out.

[tags]better gmail, firefox, scripts, firefox extensions[/tags]