A few years ago I would’ve sworn I’d never give up a rich desktop email program like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to check my email in a web browser. But here I am in 2009, a full-time web-based Gmail user. Back when I was a zealous Thunderbird evangelist, I said it was T-bird’s extensibility and the endless things it could do with add-ons that made it better than any fixed-feature webapp. But Google launched its own set of “add-ons” in the form of Gmail Labs features, and some of them have become such an important part of my email workflow I’ll never look back. Where Labs falls short, Greasemonkey user scripts via the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension fill in the gaps. The list of available Gmail Labs features seems to lengthen by the week, but there are quite a few “meh” items that drown out the really good ones. Here are the five I’ve got enabled, plus the Better Gmail 2 options I’ve got checked off.