You can hide the chat box. Look for a button at the bottom center of the sidebar (so lower left of the entire screen).

That should show you as many labels as possible. Because of the new multi-panel approach, you'll have to scroll down the sidebar if you have more labels than fit (like an iframe).

Thanks for the chat-box info.

This is more bad (Easter-egg) UI: There's no visible control next to "chat" (or any of the other labels) until you've already rolled the cursor over it. Why would the user roll the cursor over there, if there are no visible controls?

It's incredible that we're LOSING common UI sense at such a rate.

That's a very common UI mechanism on the web. The alternative is to have a bunch of handles and buttons plastered over everything.

Most desktop UIs are the same - there's all sorts of right click options on various UI elements, and have been for years. Drag and drop, drag to select, dragging stuff into your recycle bin or onto another folder to copy them.

How are you supposed to know that? By experimenting with your UI and learning how it works.

But it's one thing to learn a UI for your whole OS. You learn it once, and you're done.

For websites, it shouldn't be necessary. I personally abhor the "hidden until hover" buttons that are becoming increasingly popular. I spent ten minutes trying to discover why GitHub had removed it's "edit issue" functionality until I realized that I had to hover over the issue text for the button to appear in the corner. It's horrible.

Well, it works just fine for me. Look, non-eyeburning theme, different coloured stars, non-hidden mailboxes.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7101/6972254464_24774f868a_z.j...

Just for kicks, I switched to the default theme - same deal, mailboxes hide properly, etc. The red button's annoying, but hey, that's why I switched theme.

Perhaps you might want to quit flaming people (and Google) and fix your settings or browser or whatever the hell is wrong with your PC?

Nice downvote, but compare his screenshot and mine. There's something pretty clearly wrong with his stylesheets or browser or something. There are no visible controls in his new GMail section - something that nobody else seems to have.

Further, he doesn't seem to be even the slightest bit interested in figuring out what's going wrong.