Gmail has a Firefox funky week

Earlier this week Google announced code changes to prepare Gmail for the future, notably this week for both IE7 and Firefox 2.0 users. The roll out of the updated interface has already hit those of us with personal Gmail accounts. As is the norm, those with the no-cost, non-profit Google Apps Gmail accounts are on the back end of the roll out. It’s coming but the changes haven’t hit the free Google Apps people. At least it hasn’t hit us at LSNC.

The first-glance, apparent changes are seemingly cosmetic and involve minor changes in functionality: Larger fonts for input buttons; an always resident contacts search field on the left that in the older version only displayed when the user opted to turn on Gmail’s integrated chat feature; and more keyboard shortcuts. At least for now users have the option, illustrated here, to roll back the interface to the “older version” –

But there are deeper things going on, including a much improved Contacts manager. Truth be told, in the older interface some aspects of the Contacts features were among the worst implementations in Gmail. You could smoothly import and export contacts, yes. And, well yes again, Gmail has a superb implementation called contact sharing that automatically integrates new shared domain email users to your Contacts. OK, and Gmail’s AJAX implementation of auto-completing email addresses as you address an email message is, well, the best. But my point here is that managing your Contacts was always a cumbersome process: Adding, viewing, editing and deleting contacts was way harder than it should have been. And the worst frustration was no direct or efficient access to your contacts without opening Gmail and drilling down a few levels, at least, to get the contact information you’re looking for.

Things have changed. The Contacts manager in Gmail has had a serious, structural makeover with way better feature integration. For example, here’s a screen shot of my work entry displayed in my personal Gmail account:

Nice.

And for those with personal Gmail accounts, here’s a trick for opening the new Contacts manager its own browser window: Assuming you’re already signed into your personal Gmail account, use the URI https://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager to create a shortcut or hotkey to open the Contacts manager. And even though the new Contacts manager may have not yet been implemented openly in your Google Apps version of domain-hosted Gmail, there’s a good chance you may be able to do the same thing with this URI, substituting your domain as indicated:

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/contacts/ui/ContactManager

All these changes in Gmail coding have made Firefox a bit funky this whole week. I have experienced repeated funky, buggy sorts of problems with Firefox while using Gmail both in my personal account and my Google Apps version. Change is hard, I guess. But regardless, try it. You’ll like it. Or not.