Last few weeks, I was facing an issue with my Gmail there was a weird button on the top right area of my Gmail for the web.
It is harmless and wasn’t really doing anything but, it has its tiny dot on it, which means that there is one notification for me from that app.
It keeps annoying me and I have clicked it several times in the last few weeks.
And since the app was not serving any purpose, I thought of disabling it, only to find it is not placed by Google. Neither it was any Google supported add-on that I added to my Gmail.
So, the wild guess is, there is a notorious extension on Google Chrome browser that is making that button appear.
So, I looked at all the installed extensions and to my surprise, I had installed a Chrome Extension and that was made available by DriveHQ, and the button inside Gmail for the web was of DriveHQ.
I disabled the Chrome Extension and reloaded my Gmail and the button was gone.
Here is a video tutorial
It’s a feature of Google extension, that can add extra CSS and elements to a webpage, for enhancing the functionality to give users a better experience.
So, this feature is kind of exploited by companies. And it is actually not so bad if we look it from their perspective because it brings them business.
The only issue is, they should be more transparent and there should be some kind of are opt-in or opt-out process the users can enable or disable.
The particular extension was pretty useful as it listed all the extensions and give access to it right from the bookmark bar where I can for the Chrome extension appears.
I certainly look for an alternative and we’ll write about it as well.
Now, drive HQ isn’t the only company that is doing this there may be a lot of other companies that are doing so. By applying the same logic you can get rid of any additional weird button that appears on your favorite Web Services.
The best guess would be at its a Google Chrome extension that is doing it.
