[tokyonoise]

I am skeptical. There are apps out there extending Gmail's possibilities, already. Look at Streak (http://streak.com), look at Right Inbox (http://rightinbox.com). They are based on Chrome extensions. People use them if they need. The real trouble is Gmail becoming a bulky web app in time. Sending money, now actions in the Inbox. Lots of features, majority will not use. It is unclear, if Gmail will remain an simple email platform (which was the initial idea) or Google's promotion/enforcement ground.

[alooPotato]

This is a great point. If you aren't careful, adding extensions on top of gmail can really kill performance because of ballooning memory.

We (streak.com) spend a ton of time optimizing performance and memory usage. Not all extensions do this though.

If you're interested, there were 2 great talks at this years Google IO on how some gmail engineers spent a year reducing memory usage (and thus increasing performance) by a factor of almost 4x for power users.

[porker]

I use one of the other Chrome extensions extending GMail: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/. It works well.

The one thing Google will need to address is GMail's memory usage - it's bad enough on its own, but once you start adding extensions to it... I no longer keep GMail open unless absolutely necessary.

[Edit: link corrected]

[Flenser]

should that link be to http://www.activeinboxhq.com/ ?

[porker]

Thanks, I've corrected it!

[smackay]

Unfortunately Steve Jobs broke the lock on the Pandora's Box that contained Walled Gardens so in light of that, this seems an obvious step for Google and could likely work simply because of scale and ease of adoption - something that the existing apps don't have in comparison.

[akkartik]

The day they take away the old compose I'm switching back to mutt over IMAP.

(Unless they fix several issues with scrolling, especially in firefox.)