Labels and chat contacts now stay in view at all times. You can also customize the left navigation panel to show more labels and less chat contacts, or vice versa.

New Conversation View

Gmail no longer assigns arbitrary colors to the names of each person in a conversation. Instead, each message includes profile picture. For every previously-read message, the sender and a snippet of text are now separated onto two lines, instead of being mashed into one.

Slicker Search

A dropdown button in the search box now brings up advanced options such as searching by sender, recipient, subject and keywords. This streamlined search box takes the place of the "show search options" link in the old design.