Want to Make Your Browser Render Gmail Like the iPad?

Unlike many, I am not very fond of Gmail's conversation-style email, but I have played with the iPad a little and I do like the way it looks custom made on the iPad. So I did a little digging and discovered I can make my browser load Gmail just like on the iPad. Just takes a few changes in the settings and you will be all set. Take notes and let me know if you have any problems. I even included another bowser. I have yet to figure out some of the other browsers.

You can trick Gmail into thinking you're on an iPad with some tweaking. All that needs to be done is to change the browser's user agent, which can be done with just a small amount of effort on some browsers.

On Safari, this works on both the Mac and PC platforms. Just head into Safari's "preferences" menu, then hop over to the "advanced" tab. Go all the way to the bottom, and make sure the "show develop in menu bar" box is checked. Close the menu, then you'll find a new "develop" option in the main menu. On the Mac this can be found as one of the options on the top of the screen. On the PC, it's on the page-looking icon next to the Safari settings button on the top right of the screen. Find the develop menu, then go to user agent, then pick "other." You will get a menu to type a custom user agent string. Just drop this in there:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

That is it. Enjoy!

For FireFox it's not nearly as easy to change user agents as it is in Safari. You're going to have to download an extension for it first. User Agent Switcher is the most popular one. Once you've installed UAS, you'll find its options in the Tools menu at the top of your browser. A new option for "default user agent" will be there, go ahead and select that, then "edit user agents" in the sub-menu. Now you just have to opt to create a new user agent. Clear out all the text boxes that are already filled out, then give it a name (like "iPad"), and drop the same user agent text that we used in Safari (above) in the user agent box.

You are all set. I still have not figured it out on Google Chrome or any others, but I'll let you know if I figure it out. If you do first, let me know.