The buzz this morning isn’t Google’s Buzz, but its new Priority Inbox feature for the company’s Web based Gmail messaging service. The new feature allows heavy e-mail users to filter out and prioritize important messages. But the search giant has already hit a snag in releasing it to the public.
Users of the new feature found that a fun, instructional YouTube video used to explain the new feature was loading, invisibly, in their Chrome browser every time they logged into Gmail with the Priority Inbox feature enabled.
The video, which can be viewed here, is harmless but led to some head scratching and complaints from Gmail users, who struggled to figure out why rag time was playing every time they went to check their e-mail, as documented on a number of Google support threads.
“Whenever I sign into my Gmail using Chrome, music automatically starts playing. This is a new issue. It’s like old time dance music. Occasionally there will be a sound effect like a click, a bubble, cards shuffling, a dog growling, ” a support group user with the handle barnolde wrote.
Some Gmail users were concerned that the video was the product of a virus infection, while others reported that the invisible video hung Gmail.
In a number of posts on its support forums, Google said that it is working on a fix for the issue. In the meantime, using another browser, such as Firefox, instead of Chrome or Chromium is one way to avoid the problem. (Editors note: this Chrome user did not encounter the invisible video problem when enabling Priority Inbox on Chrome on Tuesday.)
In the meantime, some Priority Inbox users were opting to shut off the feature, rather than having to listen to 20’s era dance music as they perused their inbox messages.
