Moreover, fixed-width font was probably a pretty easy lab feature to write, and was already written. The other dropped features were also already written. Why then, prune the list of lab features? Was the list of features getting too long and no one wanted to put in the effort of categorizing them? Or was this some market-droid idiot's idea of justifying their existence? (I was (also) a fan of fixed-width...) Alternately, is it possible that there is a front end 'overhaul' coming down the pipes, and the abandoned lab features weren't worth updating?

Maintaining stuff most people don't use is an unnecessary headache. Yes it works today but what if some future gmail feature breaks it?

I'm pretty sure even Labs go through some sort of QA process.

Pruning features is as essential to software quality as adding new ones.

Because dropping features, especially those that the majority don't use, aren't polished enough (UI or stability/quality) or causes too many support issues is a good way to keep a product nice and lean. Not that I know why they dropped it.

I enabled this feature for a similar purpose (exception reports from running apps).

However, even with fixed-width available, I almost always go after the "show original" feature* instead. I find that having the message isolated in a separate tab altogether makes it much easier to read.

* "Show original" is under the drop-down menu for the message itself.

When they came out with themes I went through every theme they had until I found one with a fixed width font.

Admittedly everyone laughs at the terminal theme. But it does the trick. And the green on black is surprisingly comfortable to read.

It should be reasonably easy to make a custom stylesheet for this feature.

One already exists for the Firefox plugins Stylish/Greasemonkey. It should be trivial to adapt for other browsers that allow custom stylesheets.

http://userstyles.org/styles/22246