I find myself using gmail more and more. When I invite someone to view one of my Picasa photo albums, for example, the invitation is sent as a gmail message, of course, and so replies to the invitation come to my gmail account. But I’ve never been a fan of web-based e-mail clients, since they don’t have the all the features of a native client like Outlook or Thunderbird. But this is changing! Gmail gets better almost every day, and there are a couple of must-have Firefox extensions that make it even better:
Customizegoogle does just that – it enables you to get search results from other search engines when you do a google search, for example. But here’s the best thing: It removes all the advertisements from gmail and other google sites! It also offers you the option of changing your connection to gmail to a secure (https:) connection, which I recommend doing.
Better Gmail 2 is an astonishing plug-in for gmail that I just discovered from this Webmonkey post. Install this puppy and then choose the “redesigned” skin from tools|better gmail 2 menu in Firefox. Astonishing! [Update on Better Gmail and the "redesigned" skin: Once installed, gmail makes calls to the author's website - this may be a security concern. I'm withholding my recommendation pending more info. The skin is awesome, but not worth compromising security.]