14 DAY TRIAL // For Google, Gmail is more than just another product in its catalog, it’s Google’s premier application, the one that started it all and the one still used to showcase what the company has best to offer. With HTML5 central to Google’s long-term strategy it’s no wonder Gmail is being used to highlight some of the technology’s capabilities, like drag and drop images .
And this is just a first step, Google wants Gmail to feel no different than a native app and be as fast too. In the meantime, it introduced a more modest update, the possibility to preview Word documents in attachments with just one click.
“If you receive Microsoft Word files as attachments in Gmail, you can now view them with a single click — no need to download, save, and open files with a desktop application when you just want to read them. The Google Docs viewer that allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser now supports .doc and .docx formats too,” Marc Miller, Software Engineer at Google wrote.
You can see a “View” link next to the attachments in Gmail for Word documents just like you did with PDFs and other files. The documents will be opened in the Google Docs Viewer, but you can also choose to edit them in Docs.
It’s a small update, but it’s the way Google works, small changes and features introduced constantly. But there is a long-term strategy as well and it’s all about HTML5. Google staff engineer Adam de Boor talked about the future of Gmail at a conference and the message was clear, Google aims to blur the line between web and desktop apps even more.
One way of doing that is by enabling drag and drop downloading of attachments, much like Gmail users can now add files to an email by dragging them from their desktop. Moving to HTML5 could also mean more raw performance for Gmail, Google says just by converting the app to HTML5 and CSS3 it could see a 12 percent speed boost.
But even that is not enough, the team wants to bring down load times to under one second for Gmail. To do this, part of the app would be saved locally and be preloaded if the user has it saved as an app shortcut, like Pinned Tabs in Chrome or App Tabs in Firefox 4.0. We’re not quite there yet and the browsers will have to support all of this, but the coming months should see some interesting developments for Gmail and HTML5 at large.