Google introduces drag-and-drop in GMail, proves yet again that HTML 5 is the future

HTML 5 seems to be rapidly evolving as the future of web computing. And the world’s most popular web-based company is pushing the technology like never before. Google recently included a drag-and-drop feature in the company’s email application a.k.a GMail. In case you are using Firefox 3.6 or Chrome 4, you can now simply drag any document and paste it to your email/message window, just like you would in most desktop applications. The moment you ‘drop’ the file, GMail will automatically attach the document with the composed email.

Thanks to the new APIs that are part of HTML 5. Although the drag-and-drop feature was initially introduced in Google Wave, the company went a step higher by introducing this to GMail, which has well over 140 million users. The browser support for drag-and-drop is currently the biggest hurdle. Currently this feature is only supported by Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 4. Although Safari supports the drag-and-drop API, the feature doesn’t quite work when you use it with GMail. In case of IE 8 it is not supported at all, although you can use Google Chrome Frame as a workaround.