With A Small, Simple Feature, Gmail Continues Its Assault On Desktop Email | Hacker News Reader

With A Small, Simple Feature, Gmail Continues Its Assault On Desktop Email

techcrunch.com

19 pointsrusvell8 comments

Nice idea, but I'm running the latest Chrome, and when I drag an image on, it shows the "Drag Files Here" part in GMail OK but then when I let the click go, Chrome changes URL to the file:// URL of the local image. D'oh..

Sounds good, but it's not really an 'assault' to play catchup on features.

It is when you are already better as measured by a large number of heavy email users and the primary hold outs point to small, mostly moot, feature holes.

Must use Chrome? Doesn't sound like it uses open web standards. Will other browsers need a plugin (eg. Gears) to make this work?

I think it uses web standards (HTML5), that's why it only works on Chrome (webkit) yet. HTML 5 has made/is making Gears obsolete btw.

They're using open web standards — if I recall correctly this feature isn't enabled in Safari due to a bug affecting the dropping of a collection of files in that browser.

Drag and drop from the desktop is an HTML5 feature, but support elsewhere may not be as strong as in Chrome.

Here's an earlier article about support in FF:

http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/07/15/html5-drag-and-drop

Last I checked, one weakness of the FF support is that it can only read a dropped file into memory in its entirety -- not by fileBlob slices. That may not be fatal for typical-sized email attachments, but is a serious limitation for one of my desired applications.

(I'm not sure I'm even reading the HTML5 drag-and-drop spec right about reading ranges... but they wouldn't spec a feature that could only work with files that easily fit in the browser's memory, would they?)

As the article says; this is the advantage of making your own browser. They can support these features with a decent market share - and it pulls the other browsers along with them.

Smart moves.

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