When you are distracted from Gmail to other sites, you can easily find out how many unread messages you have in your inbox, by looking at the name of the tab or window with Gmail.
However, this does not work if you have dozens of tabs open or you use tab pinning in Chrome, which hides everything except the tab icon.
Many use special browser extensions to solve this problem, but Gmail Labs
has another good way: “Unread Message Badge”.
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This function inserts the number of unread messages directly to the Gmail icon:
To enable this feature, go to the
Labs tab in the settings , find “Unread message icon” (or “Unread message icon”), enable and save the changes. This will work in Chrome (version 6 and above) and Firefox (version 2 and above).