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A while back, we covered a fairly standard Workspace update blog post from Google. Inside of that blog post though, was something that flew completely under the radar. Google purposely dropped a single image of a completely revamped Gmail interface and chose not to say anything about it.
Despite this, it’s been eating away at us for some time now because it’s a beautiful, rounded UI complete with Material You theming. The fact that it was shown off without a mention was frustrating. More importantly, it showed off a left-aligned bar that housed “Mail”, “Chat”, “Spaces”, and “Meet”.
Now, the company has officially revealed this “New Integrated View for Gmail” and it does, in fact, combine all of the aforementioned services into one place to reduce the effort it takes to switch between them. No more extra tabs or windows – just one, unified interface for all of your productivity.
Instead of rolling this incredible, new design out to everyone in Workspace at once, Google is taking a timeline approach. Starting next week on February 8, 2022, users can opt-in to test it using a pop-up dialog that will appear at the bottom-right of the Gmail interface.
Anyone who chooses not to take part in the early tests will be automatically enrolled in the new design by default by April 2022, with the option to roll things back to the way they were before. Then, the new view will become the default Gmail experience across the board at the end of Q2 2022 with no way to go back to the old view.
Additionally, any time you search using Gmail’s search bar up top, you’ll get results for Mail, Chat, and more. I personally love the colorful labels seen in the new image, and I’m hoping this means that Gmail will finally get an official dark mode on the web.
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