New FF on Tuesday
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/12/financial/f074545D70.DTL
In a nod to the growing use of Web-based e-mail, the browser can be set to launch Yahoo Inc.'s service when clicking a "mailto" link in a Web page, the ones you might come across clicking on a name or a "contact us" link. Previously such links could only open a standalone, desktop e-mail program.
Yahoo is the only Web service initially supported. To use rivals like Google Inc.'s Gmail and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail, developers of those services will have to enable that capability first.
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I believe when you use the Google Toolbar, they can also change the "mailto:" functionality to work with Gmail, I had this set up on my old Firefox 2. Unfortunately now when I click "mailto:" links nothing at all happens anymore, guess I need to wait for Google to update their Toolbar to work with Firefox 3.
SFGate writes:
> Yahoo is the only Web service initially supported. To use rivals
> like Google Inc.'s Gmail and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail, developers
> of those services will have to enable that capability first.
Sounds slightly unbalanced, or am I missing something? Or does it merely mean that the FF developers had to decide on one of these webmailers to be default and went with Yahoo, but that you can quickly change to Gmail in the options...?
Where can I change the "mailto:" in the current latest release of FF3? |
I'm surprised to see that Firefox won't support Gmail, considering that the feature already exists.
http://lifehacker.com/392287/set-firefox-3-to-launch-gmail-for-mailto-links |
AFAIK, the point is that websites themselves can set up to be protocol handlers (of course, this means it should ask your permission first, I imagine) under FF3. What this means is that one of the options (in preferences) for launching (say) mailto links will be those websites (web applications) that have registered themselves as handlers.
It won't require the user to mess around with about:config. So Google Talk can (ask the user to) be the handler for irc://, Google Groups for news:// or nntp, you get the idea ... |
Gmail supports this feature, and Mozilla not including it in the final release isn't going to do them and their Google Ad deal any favours.
Mozilla needs Google at the moment, but Google doesn't need Mozilla. If you think about it, people who generally download Fx are probably more technical aware and know how to change the provider. The people who will be stumped are the non-technical aware, who will use whatever their OS/PC/Laptop came with. |
To register GMail for FF3, just type this into the address bar when you're on GMail (http://mail.google.com page):
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail") |
