For better or worse, Gmail on the web will now let you resize your chat and rooms section

Love it or hate it, Google Chat exists in the left-hand sidebar of the Gmail interface. Regardless of how that makes you feel, there is one thing that I’m sure we can all agree on – it’s notoriously difficult to resize. Most of us will primarily resize the chatbox to minimize it so we can make way for our extra Gmail labels, but there are those who wish to increase its size in order to see additional chats.

In a new update, Google is making it easier to grab and resize this box using a new ‘handlebar’ indicator. Simply hover over it so that your cursor transforms into a bar with an up and down arrow connected to it, click and drag up or down. This should be rolling out over the next three days beginning today for both Rapid and Scheduled Release domains.

I personally think that Google’s obsession with trying to shove absolutely everything into the Gmail interface is beginning to work against them. You can only fit so much in such spaces, and while they’re not doing too bad with adding new services to the right-hand sidebar, the left sidebar is suffering quite a bit and feels extremely cramped. I hope that in the near future, Google rethinks its approach to this.

I understand that they want to create an all-in-one workspace for getting things done, but there’s a reason why The Great Unbundling (separation of apps and services to declutter and simplify the user experience) occurred in the first place, and it feels as though we’re moving back into the territory we’ve trekked before. What do you think about this small but interesting update?

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