Minimalist Gmail by Matt Constantine

I like the fact that it is possible to switch off/on individual parts of the website (link in the upper-right corner). It would be cool if someone came up with a general solution applicable to all websites.

For a case-by-case basis, check out the Printliminator -- really neat use of JS & CSS to hide pesky elements

http://css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/

Now if this could be scripted with greasemonkey! Imagine getting rid of a few elements, then hitting 'save' in the plugin -- any subsequent visits to the page would apply the relevant css.

No mention of Helvetimail (http://www.josefrichter.com/helvetimail/) yet?

It looks like the guts of what Matt Constantine put into the Firefox add-on is covered by the userscripts mentioned here:

http://zenhabits.net/2009/09/minimalist-gmail-how-to-get-rid...

I'd guess that the Zen Habits article came first and then the Firefox extension was made for an easy one-click installation.

Edit: I'm having trouble getting those userscripts to run in my Gmail Fluid app. Maybe there's some Greasemonkey-specific stuff going on in there...

My minimalist gmail interface is called "pine", which I believe is still considered to be the reference IMAP client implementation. If I were have to make this decision today, I might use something more powerful and extensible like "mutt", but for me pine is just fine.

I started using it again a year back or so when Mail.app became too slow for me to use on some giant mailboxes I have. Deleting 5k messages from an IMAP folder in pine takes maybe 5-10 seconds. Try doing that in Mail.app. I found my email productivity went way up after switching, so I ended up using it exclusively, despite the ribbing my co-workers give me for using prehistoric email tools.