Read this first - Disclaimer
This project is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Google Inc. This is a non-profit development project which provides a Firefox extension to interested users without any guarantees. If you experience problems with Gmail Skins please report to the author of this project, and not to Google.
If you experience any problems with the Gmail service please disable the extension to see if it solves the problem before attempting to file a bug report with Google.
Gmail and the Gmail logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. It is your responsibility to read the Gmail Program Policies before attempting to use this extension.
Thanks to ImageShack for hosting the emoticon images.
Installation
Do you have firefox?Download Gmailskins from addons.mozilla.org
Change Log (and planned features)
Features that couldn't quite make it in time for this release:
- Mac gmail skin incorporated in to extension (with permission). This makes it much simpler to use the skin (this is really close, argh).
- Digg skin incorporated.
- Icon only navigation menu (replace drafts, sent, compose etc with icons). Thank you to mayosoft for a beautiful set of icons.
- ...
- What else would you like?
v0.9.6 - 27th/06/06 - Current Version
- Add pictures from Picasa web albums to your emails from the gmail formatting bar. A nice little photo select box pops up when you click on the Picasa icon.
- Now works with gmail for your domain (hosted).
- Small bar added to footer to show space remaining ("You are currently using 493 MB (18%) of your 2738 MB.").
- Fixed: IG column wasn't always appearing.
- Fixed: window.frameElement JS error
v0.9.5 - 11th/05/06
- Fixed: Settings label sometimes displayed in labels panel.
- Fixed: some memory leaks.
- Fixed: IG column for a user who has not customised google.com/ig before contained some nasty JS links.
- Fixed: Edit/Delete buttons in the IG column have now been removed from the default skin also (only because they cause issues with refreshing the frame).
- Fixed: some links were displaying in blue (gmail change).
- Fixed: reply page header was blue (gmail change).
v0.9.4 - 3rd/05/06
- Integration with http://www.google.com/ig (shown at the side of your inbox).
- All links on the gmail ig column are rewritten to open in a new window.
- Option to set ig column wide/narrow.
- Set scrollwheel to move the ig column up and down. The inbox is made to not scroll when scrolling the ig column. If the ig column cannot scroll then the inbox will scroll instead. This means you can still scroll the whole page with the mouse over the ig column if the ig column doesn't need scrolling.
- Now uses the default gmail logo (with added transparency)
- Coloured the new links at top left ("google","gmail" etc)
- Coloured add event area (on compose email)
- Fixed dissapearing gmailskins settings tab (broken due to change at gmail)
- Fixed "hide email address" option (broken due to change at gmail)
- No more "gms_skins is undefined" console error.
- Status icon in chat box now has a translucent background.
- Added attachment icons for .tif (image), .pps (powerpoint) and .xpi (extension) files.
- Corrected the text "Rows of unread messages alternate colours." on the settings panel to "Rows of read messages alternate colours." (oops, thanks Chris).
- Labels/invites/chat menus automatically collapse when using horizontal nav.
- Fixed bug: resizing text set ig iframe height to 150px.
- Fixed bug: mouseover ig column coloured first message in inbox.
- Fixed bug: ig frame sometimes dissapeared.
- Added gradient to top/bottom of ig column.
- Removed "view on your mobile phone" link from ig.
v0.9.3 - 15th/03/06
- Fixed broken skins, caused by changes in gmails HTML (I get the latest gmail client the same time as you do so don't complain!)
v0.9.2 - 2nd/03/06
- New toolbar button "insert HTML" allows you to insert any html in to a message (gmail will strip certain html out before sending but this is useful). for inserting advanced tables/lists.
- Hide email address option fixed, this was broken due to a change in the DOM at gmails end.
- Popup menus recoloured correctly (compose language select and chat status), this was broken due to a classname change from popup to pu.
- Fixed: labels/quick contacts no longer obscured on compose page.
- Fixed: attachment icons are now correctly displayed for attachments with uppercase extensions.
v0.9.1 - 1st/03/06
- Bug fix: Header and footer on inbox and other mailview pages were default blue, this was caused by an elements id being changed at gmails end, setting tab headers correctly coloured again, this was caused by some elements class attributes being changed, left border image on message view page corrected.
- Middle clicking on a message in your inbox now opens it in a new window.
- When using horizontal nav with chat enabled, the "quick contact" box will be smaller when collapsed (like the labels box). In the next version I plan to make these boxes auto-collapse when using horizontal nav (like a drop down menu) to increase usability.
- Set scrollwheel to move labels up and down when using fixed nav, this makes it possible to get to labels that run below the bottom edge of the screen (let me know what you think of this fix).
- Fixed bug: Adding smilies and images to your messages is now possible when replying.
- Fixed bug: Selecting an address with keyboard on email auto complete didn't work with gmail chat disabled.
- Fixed bug: Settings were sometimes lost if the same settings were applied consecutively (or the apply button was double clicked).
- Fixed gmail annoyance: The name column on gmails contact page is very narrow - the column will be made wider (if google changes the width in the future to fix the 'problem', gmailskins will back off) - thanks Russell.
v0.9 - 24th/02/06
- Horizontal Nav tidied up a bit - menu items are now actually lined up with each other.
- Large speed increases. Some functions were being run n^2 times when only n times was needed (n is the number of frames - this increased a lot with the new chat feature too, oops!). This should put an end to most of the flicking of the normal gmail CSS before the gmailskins CSS is applied.
- Fix I-beam dissapearing on the left of compose text box when Scroll Navigation With Page is off. This was caused by Gmail not initially setting any styles on the drop down Chat Status Select box and it's parent being set to fixed (the invisible div hung out over the left of the compose box, making the ibeam dissapear (FF bug?). Urgh.
- Now recognises more file formats for attachment icon (bz2, gz, 7z, wav, midi, and open document formats).
- New feature Gmail Chat fully partially skinned, I am not going to skin the individual chat windows (yet at least) as they feel quite seperate from the gmail interface.
- "Hide Search/Filter Options" link recoloured.
- Turning "Scroll Navigation with Page" off is now more acceptable with horizontal nav.
- No longer only checks for style element as lastChild - this resolves issues with TargetAlert extension and anything else that may alter the DOM after gmailskins has.
- The "autocomplete" To-Address field now correctly highlights when selecting an item with the keyboard.
- Skinned the annoying hover popup.
- Hide footer now hides the WHOLE footer.
v0.8 - 12th/02/06
- Now works with accounts that have the new Gmail chat feature. Only the javascript has been updated (not the CSS). This means that the new interface elements are still default gmail blue. This will be addressed in an imminent release (I really need some sleep).
- Removed blue rectangle at bottom of drafts page.
- Missed the "display external images panel", oops.
- Made the skin select box prettier. Each item is coloured with the main skin colour on mouseover. Firefox doesn't usually allow you to set the mouseover colour of select boxs, so this involves a bit of a hack with option elements of width zero and 500px right coloured borders - the option text just overflows in to the border. If there is a css property I was missing which makes this easier please let me know! This wouldn't have been possible without Firefoxs support for png alpha.
- Finally made the emoticon buttons undraggable. I think -moz-user-select:none; doesn't work with content loaded from chrome. Had to resort to onmousedown='return false'. This stops users from inserting the local src of the emoticon in to a message.
v0.7.2 - Bug fix - 27th/01/06
- Fixed settings not being saved when using a secure connection. Anyone using extensions that forced gmail to use a https connection would have seen this also.
- Fixed reply/forward buttons not always visible on reply page.
v0.7.1 - Bug fix - 20th/01/06
- Compatibility broke with Gmail about two hours ago, must be all of the new features Gmail are adding! This is a very small fix, it just changes "28" to "37" on line 1,007 of javascript.js and can be changed yourself if you don't want to upgrade.
v0.7 - Extend firefox entry - 6th/01/06
- CSS: 20 different skins now.
- User friendly: Because the settings are changed on the Gmail settings page it may be confusing to users who are expecting them to be under the Preferences button in the Firefox Extention Manager. I added a notice there (with pictures) to point users in the right direction.
- Using the keyboard to select skins now updates preview (onKeyPress event added to select)
- Added some new attachment icons.
- Added background instructions to preview pane.
- Better compatibility with updated Gmail Greasemonkey scripts.
- Pretty: Added gradient effect to preview pane edges.
- Fixed: Slow preview (I thought duplicate event listeners were ignored?).
- New Feature: Preview pane - changing skin options now shows a small preview (uses the canvas/drawWindow stuff in Firefox 1.5).
v0.6 - First public release - 23rd/12/05
- JS: Cleaned out old code.
- Gmail Program Policies: TM displayed in Gmail logo.
- CSS: Google Mail changed to Gmail in logo, this also makes it easier to add TM with just CSS (using :after content as TM instead of Mail).
- Fixed: Smiley/add image buttons were not being added when re-entering rich formatting mode.
- CSS: Greatly improved message-reply area.
- Gmail Program Policies: No longer removes (c) google when turning footer off.
- CSS: Some more themes added, ugly mess does not count as a bug.
- New Feature: Add emoticons to email messages.
- New Feature: Add images to email messages by specifying a URL.
- CSS: Skinned Language select drop down box on compose page.
- CSS: Skinned drop down auto complete box (for To, CC, BCC fields).
- CSS: now skins Gmail Saved Searches panel and Gmail Conversation Preview panel.
- Fixed: now works fine with greasemonkey installed, had some funny function name problems.
- Good: added some basic detection + warning message for users with many labels/low res when setting scroll_nav off.
- New option: hide account name at the top right of inbox.
v0.5 - Second private beta
- CSS: fully skinned new gmail feature (Vacation responder).
- CSS: fixed curved border error on view message page caused by web clips.
- New option: made zebra tables in to an option.
- New option: Make paperclip attachment icon show the filetype of attachment in inbox.
- CSS: fully skinned new gmail feature (Webclips).
- CSS: improved speed of skin application.
- CSS: fixed horizontal nav on compose page.
- New option: horizontal nav.
- Fixed: Oops, missed one, a.f --> a.g, should work if it changes again.
- Funtions are 'edited' (substring, regex) instead of overwritten.
v0.4 - First private beta
- All variables/functions now "discovered" (ie: no gmail function/variable names are hard coded except for the insertion point P), this means it is no longer limited to my gmail account.
- Contacts page skinned, some css fixed.
- All but two variables are now "discovered".
- Silly me: If the default GMAIL settings have not been changed then they are not where one would expect them to be in the gmail JS. This was resulting in the extension picking up the wrong value for the account language on some accounts, fixed with a simple loop.
- CSS: Some more areas skinned, still got the contacts page to do.
- Good: Does not inject javascript unless lang:en-us
- Gui: different welcome message if not using lang en-us, not ideal but the best way for now.
- Annoying: Table resizing on Apply click (this is to do with scroll bar dissapearing I think) - ignored, this is nothing to do with the extension.
- Fixed: form elements did not reset their state when returning to the settings page (means a forced refresh of the session after every setting apply is now not necessary).
- Gui: welcome message now links directly to the correct settings tab, nice.
- Fixed: works with https properly now.
- Fixed: Duplicate label problems fixed, now deletes labels correctly.
- CSS: Now removes all styles before applying a new one, so even if a stylesheet has no effect on an element that a previous stylesheet did, the element styles will still be reset.
- Speed: greatly reduced time taken to apply skin, should no longer flash as skin is being applied and won't slow the browser down to a crawl if left open overnight.
- Tidy: Sorted out variable names.
- Damn cool: Save settings to contact name/label - label, had to be, it was the only thing accessable to function P on initial load.
- Little big change: Now an extension rather than a greasemonkey script, it was getting too big and I plan on using some FF1.5 features in the future (drawWindow).
v0.3
- Complete (from scratch) rewrite.
- Much easier to add extra prefs and extra skins now.
- Much cleaner code.
- Equal to v0.2 in terms of features.
v0.2
- Important: Added some basic checks so that if the functions are changed at gmails end they will not be overwritten.
- Fixed: removed mystery > on settings page
- Now works better: with gmail (js array version 2, 4, 6 and 8 and will do nothing if another version is found)
- Pretty: Capital first letter for skin names in select box.
- Fixed: Fix all frames not being skinned on settings change (when you go back to inbox, old theme is updated).
- New option: fix position of left nav (scrolls with page).
- Fixed: fix il not defined.
- Gui: Format tab to look like other settings.
- New option: Hide/show invites panel.
- New option: Hide/show footer.
- Gui: Use radio buttons like the rest of gmail settings.
v0.1 - First version - 10th/11/05
- One skin.
- Basic settings panel.
Well, I have been wanting to do this for a while, what better time than for the Extend Firefox Competition
To Do
Here is my very rough to do list
now: Rework the CSS gen function - this is taking a very long time New option: icons instead of text on nav (still waiting on a guy who may supply some icons - got some icons! :) - this requires some major reworking to allow for 3 settings per option (default, default with icons, icons only). reconsider zebra strength finish contact box integrate google groups favourites and google bookmarks later: add uninstall button to settings tab that will delete the label and remove extension Allow adding custom CSS (eg: for font selection) new windows do not have any CSS applied (hijack open.window?) Attachment icon 1px cut off Error: uncaught exception: null option: force https? location.href = location.href.replace(/^http:/, 'https:'); tidy: split file up user can add themes, theme editor, random base colour for others to be determined? styles with themes? Sort out the horizontal wrapping selected messages hightlighting woes tweak reply page bottom Need help: Make it work with seamonkey (it's possible and should be an easy job for someone who knows about seamonkey)
Donate
If you liked this extension then email me to say thanks or send me large amounts of money :)
mdparker at gmail dot com