Netbooks have their problems. I am not anti-netbook like some people. I just have fairly big hands, and I find them practically impossible to type on. A software engineer at Google noticed that sometimes netbooks have problems displaying email subject lines as well.
“Some time ago I bought a netbook. It’s perfect in terms of portability, weight and space usage, but the natural drawback is the size of the screen,” says Christopher Semturs on the Gmail Blog. “It’s so small that sometimes I find it hard to read the subjects of emails in my inbox.”
Semturs notes that there are some workarounds for this. He specifically mentions Google Chrome’s full screen mode. Not everyone uses Chrome though, and certainly not every Gmail user uses it either. Semturs has created a new Gmail Labs feature that takes care of the problem, so all Gmail users who own netbooks can work around the issue easily.
The lab is called “Remove Labels from Subjects” and you can probably guess from the name that it removes labels from subject lines. This leaves more space for the subjects themselves.
To utilize this feature, go to the Labs tab under settings in Gmail, find “Remove Labels from Subjects,” and activate it. Being how the feature is in labs, the possibility exists that there are some bugs, although Semturs does not say that there are any that are known.
