Gmail Drag-and-Drop Attachments in Chrome and Firefox

Google is not done with adding new features to Gmail. Having just introduced a nifty invite option that integrates Google Calendar with Gmail and makes it easy to create an event while sending an email, it is now announcing another very cool feature, drag-and-drop attachments. It’s exactly what you think it is, just drag a file or even several over the Gmail tab or window and they’ll get added to the email, no other questions asked.

“I'm always looking for ways to save time. Suppose I want to attach some files to an email, and I already have a folder open containing those files,” Adam de Boor, software engineer at Google, wrote.

“I used to have to click ‘Attach a file,’ find the photos, click them, etc. Starting today, if I'm using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6, I can just drag and drop the files to attach them — easy as pie,” he explained. “We'll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only.”

That’s all there is to it, there’s no option to enable, no special requirements, apart from using a browser that supports the functionality, no buttons to click, no keyboard shortcuts to press. Select a bunch of files and drag them to your browser.

Google doesn’t say it, but the feature is made possible by the wonderful magic of HTML5. Specifically, the Drag and Drop API in HTML5 that enables just this kind of functionality. The API has been in the works for a while, but has only recently started being supported in web browsers. In fact, just a couple of browsers, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome. It’s also supported in Chromium and anything else that’s built on that as well, of course. Support for other browsers should come as soon as it implements the API. You can see the Drag and Drop API in Firefox 3.6 in action here.