Google just rolled out an excellent new two-pane Gmail interface for tablets like the iPad, and whether or not you're buying one, it's a cool big-screen version of Gmail some people may want to use on their desktops. Here's how you can.
Using the tablet-friendly, two-pane Gmail on your regular old computer is pretty simple, and it employs the same user agent tricks that we've used for all kinds of things in the past. So first, a quick rundown:
Every browser you use has an associated "user agent" that it transmits to servers when it requests a page. This user agent allows the server to return customized layouts for different browser types. In the case of Gmail, it looks for the iPad's user agent, then returns the specialized tablet-friendly interface. If you want to use that interface on your non-iPad, the solution is simple: You need to change the user agent in your browser.
Here's how it works in Firefox:
- Install the User Agent Switcher Firefox extension
- Once installed, go to Tools -> Default User Agent -> Edit user agents.
- Click New -> User agent, then put together your iPad-spoofing user agent. It should look like the screenshot below:
The most important text goes in the User Agent field, which you can copy and paste from the text below (found via Stack Overflow):
Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10 - Now that you've added the new user agent, select it as your active user agent. (Tools -> Default User Agent -> iPad)
- Now navigate to and log into Gmail. When it loads the Gmail interface, you should see the tablet-friendly interface you see in the screenshot above.
You can switch the user agent in nearly any browser, but that's one way to do it in Firefox. You can also use a dedicated Fluid instance, change Chrome's user agent string, and more.
Note: Gmail for mobile is optimized for mobile devices and touch UI, and isn't officially supported on desktop browsers. That said, it's worth noting that Gmail for mobile is designed for Webkit-based browsers, such as Safari and Chrome, and will perform better on these browsers.
If you love Gmail's awesome keyboard shortcuts, it's probably not the interface for you, but if you like a good two-paned email interface, it might be right up your alley.
Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.
