The Preview Pane, which was up to now exclusively being used by tablet owners has trickled down to desktop and all Google Apps users.
Preview Pane, now available in Gmail Labs, allows users to simultaneously preview parts of an email while reading or replying to others.
Announcing the feature, Maciek Nowakowski, a Google associate product manager wrote in a blog post, “When I check my email, I often rely on the message snippets to figure out which messages to open first, though, sometimes I want to see more than snippets, which is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane.”
Remarking that tablet owners who use Gmail would be familiar with the feature Nowakowski said that the search engine giant is of the opinion that it would work especially well on a larger resolution screen.
When you activate the Preview Pane, it opens up a three-window panel for Gmail, with the Preview Pane in between the navigation and email planes. If you choose the horizontal split, the preview pane appears at the top and emails below the preview pane. Users can change the pane settings with a button that appears on the top right corner of Gmail.
After you enable the Preview Pane from the Labs tab in Gmail Settings, you will see a toggle button in the top right corner of your message list. This button will let you switch between preview and list views.
For those of you who have more vertical space you can also move the preview pane below your message list. You can enable this using the dropdown arrow next to the toggle button:
By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings:
If you’d like to remove the new layout, simply return to Gmail Settings and disable the lab.
However, Ben Parr of Mashable said that the feature broke Gmail Labels and led to an ‘ugly and cluttered look.’ “The concept of a Preview Pane sounds intriguing, but my initial tests lead me to conclude it’s a clunky and incomplete product. It breaks up my Gmail Labels in a way that keeps them from lining up with Gmail’s navigation pane, leading to a ugly and cluttered look. The standard two-pane system is cleaner, although you probably can get through more emails with Preview Pane activated,” he said.
Though both Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail lack a default preview pane view, they can be configured using the Options menu to enable it. For example, Hotmail offers two pane options, either to the right or the bottom of the screen.