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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how annoying it is to have 5 gmail tabs open and have to constantly switch between them because you have email threads that you need open and then a compose window as well. And every time you switch you have to cycle through them to choose the right one? This is a daily occurrence. I hugely welcome this change.

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Could you flesh this out so I can understand the benefit? Are you replying to each of the threads, and thus need 5 compose windows as well? I tend to stick with windows and rarely use tabs, so I certainly could be missing an essential use case.

One tab: an email with project build instructions.

One tab: an email with a homework assignment.

One tab: my inbox.

One tab: composing a reply to a recruiter.

Two tabs: Other emails from the recruiter I'm using to compose my reply to the recruiter.

The first three I'm fine with being separate tabs in Chrome. That's fully intentional. However, the last three tabs are all one task, and in my mind should be achievable in one window/tab.

Not saying I haven't been there, but that's a lot of multitasking. You could probably get the tasks done more efficiently if you worked on the homework assignment and recruiter emails in serial, and then set aside dedicated time to check your inbox.

The problem there is that you need to load an application 5 times rather than 1 time, and then opening up the separate emails in their own tab. Introducing another floaty thing that reinvents the wheel isn't the proper solution here.

Are you arguing for tabs inside the Gmail interface? It's the same functional equivalent, we're just quibbling about style then.

You've always had the option of compose in a new window, shift-click.

I just got done describing that that's not what I want, though I'm not sure I made myself very clear.

Different tabs, different windows, it's all the same thing. I want Gmail open exactly once for a single goal. My other post describes my use-cases more completely.

It seems to me that you're using gmail wrong. Focus on one thing at a time, switching between random things isn't going to help and if you do need to do that use the tabs. I just can't be too sympathetic to complaining about how hard it is to switch between tabs. Learn to use the keyboard shortcuts and focus on tasks sequentially rather than randomly chopping between different tasks.

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