For those interested the API it's using is navigator.registerProtocolHandler.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/timers.html#custom-handlers

http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/06/Registering-a-custom-p...

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.

Oh, I should submit a bug report instead of posting here.

The wording is confusing and I had to do a double take and then click on the help to figure out what its' really wanting to let me know.

"Allow Gmail to open all email links" is terrible wording. It would seem to the average user that gmail wants to open up all the links in their email.

mailto: is getting less common (due to spambots) and personally I can't remember the last time I clicked on one of those (that wasn't a web page from 2002).

This will cause a lot of confusion and some tech support calls from family/friends.

Wouldn't it make more sense to say "Do you want to use Chrome as your default email client" or something?

The whole post is terribly worded. When I heard "email links" I naturally thought, "links in my email" and not "mailto: pseudo-protocol links." So I was very confused when it said that "an application on my computer that I never used would pop up and interrupt me" and that now the links "will open a fresh Gmail compose window."

mailto: is getting less common due to spambots?

I thought spam filters were getting better. I never hide my email address and get next to 0 spam (gmail).

Yup, I had the same reaction. Still, once I figured it out I was duly impressed. I hated clicking links and having it launch the never-used mail.app.

in FF you just go to preferences http://i.imgur.com/Nf6hK.png

My, what an intuitive interface! Just add a new "mailto" content-type and link it to gmail.

Theres so much wrong with this on so many levels. "mailto" isn't a freaking Content-Type, and this is not the right way to design interfaces.

a selector pops up the first time you click a mailto: link

would renaming it to 'link type' solve your problem?

this ui to associate links to apps works since, I don't know, old versions of IE? it's a bit obscure, yes, but how would you solve it?

And if you want to open mailto links in Gmail with Firefox (and Opera I guess): http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/Getting-Gmail-to-handl...

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

On the front page of my website where I display a mailto link, I also have GMail and Yahoo specific compose links:

"Email: mymailtolink (Compose with GMail/Yahoo)"

https://grepular.com/

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:

https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...

Interesting experiment, but I don't think webdevs should interfere with what client should be run by the user to send the email. Mailto: works just fine, and it's up to the user to set up the client for mailto.

Edit: Mea Culpa. I see this is for desktop links.

I clicked the help last night when this popped up and must have read it incorrectly.

However, this can still cause problems if you have 2 email clients, say Outlook for my corporate mail and gmail for my personal mail.

IT departments are going to love this.

If you use gmail, why wouldn't you choose to do this? I'm so sick of mailto: links opening up whatever useless mail client came preinstalled on whatever computer I'm using.

wut? This is for mailto links on webpages, not links within an email to webpages.

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.

They could at least have sent the page you're trying to load so that it's ready to render immediately (instead of having to retrieve it from the server after the "container" has loaded).

Yeah, whatever they're doing about server-side rendering is just completely failing, which is really surprising. Gmail works well without js, so it's not as if they don't have competent web devs.

Smuggling XML in a giant CSS comment is also very … special.

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.

Secure, Fast, and Feature-Complete.

Pick two.

What other protocols can developers use this new method with?

I believe Google Calendar also asks if you want iCal files to be opened in Google Calendar. I think other sites could register as that protocol handler as well.

Any protocol can request to be registered with the browser. Just a simple line of JavaScript[1]:

window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(scheme, url, title);

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/timers.html#custom-handlers

irccloud.com (no affiliation, it's convenient though quite buggy) will open irc: links.

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

Seems that's intentional, even without a pinned gmail tab: "Say yes, and clicking on email links in any application on your computer will open a fresh Gmail compose window."

Creepy.

finally