Did you ever thought you can use the iPad version of Gmail in your computer web browser? In this article I am going to teach you step-by-step how to configure Google Chrome to use the iPad version of Gmail and make your time working with emails more enjoyable.
1. You first need to create a Google Chrome application shortcut for the Gmail web page, and don’t worry if you don’t know how to perform this task, here is a previous article that explains in detail How to create application shortcuts using Google Chrome.
2. Once you have created the application shortcut, right-click on the shortcut and select Properties. Remember where you placed the shortcut — for this article I am just going to assume that you placed it on your Windows desktop.
3. Next, under the Target field add the following line (switch) that you see below with the iPad user-agent for Google Chrome at the end of the content that is already there — leave a space between the content and the user-agent –:
–user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; iPhone OS 3_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 Mobile/7B314″ –user-data-dir=”%tmp%\gmipad”
The Target field should look something like this, if you are in Windows 7, after you append the switch with the user-agent mentioned above:
C:\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –app=https://mail.google.com/mail –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; iPhone OS 3_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 Mobile/7B314″ –user-data-dir=”%tmp%\gmipad”
4. Click the Apply button and then the OK button to finish.
Now just double-click the shortcut to launch Gmail in your Google Chrome with the iPad user-agent and that’s all there is to it.
The cool thing about this is that you can open another regular Google Chrome window and surf the internet without being logged in to Gmail; this method is also useful when you want to be logged in to multiple Gmail accounts without the need of creating manually additional profiles. Additionally Google Chrome can save your username and password (if you want), that way you don’t have to enter your credentials once again the next time — something that it will not happen if you are using Google Chrome in incognito mode.
The iPad version of Google+, Calendar and other Google products can be accessed using the computer web browser as well, even the iPad version of YouTube can be accessed, but videos may and may not work correctly.
What I am showing you today not only works just on Google Chrome, Gmail for iPad may also work in other web browsers. If you want to try this trick in another browser, you need to change the browser’s user-agent to the following:
Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10
All this is possible because this version of Gmail is not an iPad app that you have to download and install, you are just telling Google mail service for what platform (system) you are requesting the service.
Here is a tip:
If you try to re-size the window that is currently on the version of Gmail for iPad, you’ll notice that now you have scroll bars, and this can be a little bit annoying; to get rid of them, just refresh the session by pressing F5 and the Gmail session will adapt to the size of the window. And to navigate back and forth between pages, you can use the ALT+Left arrow and ALT+Right arrow keyboard shortcuts.
Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me. Email him at [email protected].