Gmail Further Enhances Drag and Drop Capabilities

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 09 Aug 2010

Mountain View-based search engine giant Google has further enhanced the drag and drop capabilities of its email client, Gmail. To save an attachment to your computer you can now simply drag and drop that attachment to save it locally. All you have to do is click and hold the attachment, then drag and drop it to any location in your file system – it is as simple as that.

There is one little catch though. This functionality is available to all Gmail users with one condition: you have to be using Google’s own web browser to be able to save attachments by dragging and dropping them. So if you’re on Google Chrome, you can forget about clicking the “Download” link to save an attachment.

Back in April Google announced that if you wanted to attach a file to an outgoing file, you did not have to go about it the old fashioned way which required you to first click "Attach a file", then look for the file you want to attach, then select the file and click "Open". Oh no, Google announced a much more convenient way to go about it: simply drag the file and drop it into Gmail.

Then in May Google came with another announcement; the Mountain View-based search engine giant announced that it extended the drag and drop functionality to allow users to drag and drop images to the body of an outgoing email. If the user had the Insert Images lab activated, then he could simply drag and drop the image he wanted to add to the body of an email.

Both announcements were followed by a warning message that sounded like this: this functionality is currently available to Chrome and Firefox 3.6 users. But then in July Google announced that the drag and drop functionality presented above became available for Safari as well. We can only assume that the option to save attachments by dragging and dropping them will soon become available for other browsers, that it will not remain exclusive to the Chrome browser.


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