Last week iGoogle introduced several new features including a left-hand nav bar and expandable gadgets.  This change was explained in a post on the Google.com blog.

“Having everything in one place is super convenient, but I often wish I could deal with all my stuff without having to leave my iGoogle page.”

Part of this change involved releasing a new Gmail gadget, that makes use of “canvas” (expanded) view to allow users to send, forward, archive and delete emails from inside iGoogle.  When the gadget is at its normal size, it provides a simple preview of the inbox.  While it’s great to see new features added to the gadget, on the whole, working with the partially functioning version of Gmail available in expanded view is not much fun.  It doesn’t allow you to save drafts, send attachments, search, use labels etc, which has some users very pissed.  My inclination is to skip the expanded view and go straight to full Gmail when I need to do something, which makes me wonder why the gadget doesn’t just do that automatically (maybe this could be added as an option in the user preferences). Bottom line is dashboard mode is still as useful as ever, but the expanded view probably introduces more problems than it solves, particuiarly since it’s not much faster than just opening Gmail.