Chrome Now Officially Lets You Open All Email Links In Gmail

For those interested the API it's using is navigator.registerProtocolHandler.<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/timers.html#custom-handlers" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/timers.html#custom-handlers</a><p><a href="http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/06/Registering-a-custom-protocol-handler" rel="nofollow">http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/06/Registering-a-custom-p...</a>

This is an odd wording: "Allow ... [No] [Use Gmail]". This may confuse people who will think that in order to use Gmail, you have to click this button.<p>Oh, I should submit a bug report instead of posting here.

in FF you just go to preferences <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Nf6hK.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Nf6hK.png</a>

And if you want to open mailto links in Gmail with Firefox (and Opera I guess): <a href="http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/Getting-Gmail-to-handle-all-mailto-links-with-registerProtocolHandler" rel="nofollow">http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/Getting-Gmail-to-handl...</a>

On the front page of my website where I display a mailto link, I also have GMail and Yahoo specific compose links:<p>"Email: mymailtolink (Compose with GMail/Yahoo)"<p><a href="https://grepular.com/" rel="nofollow">https://grepular.com/</a><p>I wrote some JavaScript code a while back which would automatically detect if a visitor was logged in to GMail, and would replace all mailto links on my page with GMail compose links instead. I never put it live on my site though as the process of detecting if a user is logged in to gmail is pretty dodgy. In case you're interested in the code, or the detection process:<p><a href="https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information" rel="nofollow">https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...</a>

Google finally incorporates another obvious feature, obviating the need for a silly chrome add-on. Yay.

Edit: Mea Culpa. I see this is for desktop links.<p>I clicked the help last night when this popped up and must have read it incorrectly.<p>However, this can still cause problems if you have 2 email clients, say Outlook for my corporate mail and gmail for my personal mail.<p>IT departments are going to love this.

A complete aside, but the pushState/client side rendering implementation on the blog surprised and confused me massively. It seems like the wrong tool for a blog.

It took them a while to build that in. So secure and fast, but something as basic as this (which the competition got since day one) has no priority apparently.

What other protocols can developers use this new method with?

When I tried this out yesterday with a pinned gmail tab clicking the email link opened up a <i>new</i> tab and loaded gmail :(

Creepy.

finally

This really great!