You’ve Got Mail!

I’m a big fan of Gmail and Google Reader. I generally leave these tabs (along with Google Calendar) open all day long. To minimize the amount of visual space these long-lived tabs consume in the tab bar, I use the great FaviconizeTab extension. However, with these tabs minified, you lose the ability to be notified visually (via the title text) of new mail or new posts. A simple solution that I found years ago was to write a simple user style to change the background color of the tab whenever a new item arrives. It’s a great simple solution that doesn’t require any new programs or extensions. For those of you who use the Stylish extension, I’ve finally gotten around to posting this style to userstyles.org so installation is dead-simple. This style also works well with the Badges on Favicon extension which actually displays the number of unread items via small ‘badge’ on the tab. Go ahead and grab the style now! I’ve posted a Firefox 1.5 – 2.0 compatible version as well. (But seriously, if you’re not using Firefox 3, upgrade now!)