According to most statistics, Gmail is the second most used email service in the world, only behind Outlook, which of course has countless users that Hotmail has added over the years of its existence. And yes, it’s true that Gmail recently turned 20, having launched (initially with invite-only access) on April 1, 2004, but by then Hotmail was almost eight years old. was held on July 4, 1996.

During all these years, Google is trying to make its service more attractive, trying to maintain the huge impact that its launch caused by offering no less than a gigabyte of storage. It may seem like the most normal thing in the world from today’s perspective, but at the time it was most common to have between 10 and 25 megabytes for free accounts, although it is true that many of its rivals were rapidly increasing their account sizes. from the Google mail service.

The growth in the number of accounts, as well as their capacity, led Google to you need to start deleting inactive accounts, as it was announced at the beginning of last year and started to be implemented at the end of it. So Gmail is apparently in very good health and is actually one of Google’s strategic services, although that doesn’t stop horrendously absurd hoaxes from circulating, like the one from earlier this year that said its shutdown was on the table.

Sometimes the changes are big, but in many cases it’s the little details that, as I never tire of saying, can make a big difference on a day-to-day basis. And today, as we can see in the service itself, we find it Google has simplified the toolbar that appears when you open an email. Specifically, he reduced the elements depicted in it from ten to seven.

More precisely, simplified version shows the controls:

• Return to received
• file
• mark as spam
• Remove
• Mark as unread
• Move to
• Further

So in this Gmail bar view controls were hidden

• Defer
• Add to tasks
• Tags

Now, if you usually use them, you should not worry because were not removed. If you use them occasionally, you can find them in the menu that appears after clicking More. And if you want, you can restore the classic toolbar, now called “Advanced”, from the same menu.

Google has always preferred relatively clean interfaces However, with updates and new features to their services, it’s common for them to add more features, which kind of goes against this minimalist criteria. So this change represents exactly a step in that direction, in simplifying the interface, which is always recommended.