I once again continue where I left off with my previous post here, as I write about the new and old versions of Gmail, and the Greasemonkey scripts that work with each of these versions. As I mentioned, a new version of Gmail has come out, and a number of Greasemonkey scripts that have been designed to work with Gmail do not work properly with this new version. This has been considered an issue by those who use these scripts, as was noted in a few comments posted after the announcement on Lifehacker about the release of the Better Gmail 2 extension. However, as Gina Trapani mentioned in those comments, the older version of Gmail could still be used. In fact, this older version is only one mouse click away from this newer version of Gmail. However, considering the number of Greasemonkey scripts that work only with the older version of Gmail, some may prefer to have this older version load by default when logging into Gmail. And in fact, you may have seen that in those comments in the Lifehacker post that I mentioned, I suggested that some might want to be automatically redirected to this older version after logging into Gmail. Although I got the impression that there was not much interest in automatic redirection to the older version, I decided to provide a solution for those who would want to be redirected to this version. And it only seemed appropriate to solve this problem that is related to use of Greasemonkey scripts by writing a Greasemonkey script. So I decided to write this simple Greasemonkey script that redirects the user to the older version of Gmail when logging into Gmail. And if you are using Firefox and have the Greasemonkey extension installed, you can install this script by clicking here.
This script may not be considered very useful. And if it were very useful, one like it would have likely been written and made available long before I released it. However, as long as there are reasons to use the older version of Gmail, there will be reasons to use this script. In addition to being able to continue using these previously mentioned scripts that one would want to use with Gmail, there are other reasons one might prefer to be redirected to this older version of Gmail. For example, it was said in comments here that prefetching of messages, which is done in the newer version, may not necessarily be a good idea. However, this script may not be considered useful at all for much longer. This new version of Gmail does have a number of useful features that many users may like to use. And newer Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail are already on the way anyway, and Gmail is becoming more Greasemonkey-friendly, as you can see in what was written here on the Official Gmail Blog. Still, for at least the time being, it is this Greasemonkey script that I wrote that you may want to be using when logging into Gmail.
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