If you are wondering why your friends list in GMail chat is suddenly showing friends’ status messages, wonder no longer! You are not alone. With Google concentrating on useless new stuff like buzz, wave etc, they seem to have forgotten what the users really want.

As I value screen space more than gold, I hate it when status messages show up and bloat my list size to twice its original size. Most people think that this is the aftermath of Google’s new Buzz. Well, no actually, this happens because the setting to hide the statuses isn’t an inbuilt feature in Google Chat, but is a Google Labs feature. Its called Muzzle and Google have silently removed it from the Labs database, along with it some other features listed here [Gmail Labs graduation and retirement]. I can understand when they say they want to clean up, but keeping the Back to Beta feature which just adds a beta label to GMail and eliminating Muzzle seems utterly stupid.

The only solution that I have found so far is to use a greasemonkey script which will hide the statuses and make it behave normally. You can find it here [GMail Muzzle Lab Reviving]. If you are not familiar with scripts read this [Installing Scripts]. I will update this post when there is a better alternative to this.

Bookmark and Share