Gmail in a desktop app, or in a browser tab?

The tab is the default, and it is a good one: complete, free and always current. Whether a desktop app is worth having comes down to a handful of specific things, and how much each one costs you in an ordinary day. Here they are, both directions.

What the browser keeps

• Every feature, the day Google ships it. Gmail on the web is the reference. A desktop app covers what Google’s API exposes, which is most of Gmail but not all of it. Hark lists the handful it cannot reach as links to Gmail on the web rather than leaving them out.
• Add-ons, Chat and Meet in the side panel. Those are part of the web page, and a desktop app that does not load the web page does not have them.
• Several accounts, a click apart. The web switches between signed-in accounts from the avatar menu. Hark connects one account per install while it is in beta; the unified inbox across several is built and switched off for now.
• No price. Hark is free during the beta, and after it a 30-day trial and then a subscription. The tab costs nothing.

What a desktop app changes

• Notifications you can rely on. A browser notifies you when the tab is open and the browser feels like it; a desktop app notifies you through Notification Center, with a Dock badge that shows the same unread count Gmail shows and a menu-bar glance at what just arrived. Hark stays silent while it is the app in front, because a sound for something already on your screen is noise.
• A window, not a tab. ⌘Tab finds it. It can live on its own Space. A message you are writing is its own window, so ⌘W closes the draft you are in and not the inbox, and nothing you do in the browser can close your mail by accident.
• One process doing one job. A tab shares a browser with everything else you have open. An app is the app: its memory is its own, and the inbox opens from a local database rather than by loading a page.
• Reading without a connection. What has synced stays readable on a plane or a bad hotel network. The browser’s offline mode exists, but it is a setting most people have never turned on.
• The Mac’s own text editing. Writing happens in a real macOS text view: the system spell checker, bold and italic from the formatting bar, the standard Edit menu, a file dropped on the message to attach it.
• Search that is still Gmail’s. from:, has:attachment, older_than:1y— a good desktop app sends the operators to Google as typed and shows Gmail’s results, so nothing you have learned is lost.

The thing neither the tab nor a mail app gives you

Gmail in a browser has a calendar side panel; a native mail app has no calendar at all. Hark puts a full, editable Google Calendar and Google Tasks in the same window as your mail, one click apart on the same rail, with an invitation answered from the message it arrived in. That is the difference between Hark and the other desktop apps, and it has its own page.

Where your mail goes, in each case

In the browser, your mail is at Google and nowhere else. A desktop app can keep that shape or break it, depending on how it is built: some route mail through a server of their own to sync it. Hark keeps the shape — it talks to Google directly from your Mac, has no server for your mail, and keeps your Google tokens in the Keychain. The details, and how to check them, are on a Gmail client that never sees your mail.

A fair way to decide

Three questions, honestly answered, settle it for most people:

• Do you miss things? If mail arrives and you find out later because the tab was buried, a desktop app is the fix, and it is the whole fix.
• Do you live in your calendar? If your day runs on invitations and a week view, the side panel is the thing you are working around. One window with both is what Hark is for.
• Do you want mail out of the browser? Some people want the browser to be for the web and mail to be somewhere else, the way it is on a phone. If that is you, the tab was never going to feel right.

If none of those is a yes, keep the tab. It is a good default, and nothing on this page is trying to talk you out of it.

Questions