A new option is available in google mail! It is called desktop notifications! And it is pretty cool! Google now allows you to set up popups on your desktop whenever you get new mail, or when you get a chat request. This further pushes the line from desktop apps, to web based apps. Before this, I always installed Google talk as my desktop notifier, but this setting makes it obsolete. Its very quick, and the popup is very noticeable. Obviously, Google is ready to bring everything to its cloud based architecture. To turn this setting on, make sure you are running Google chrome, and go to your settings menu.
as you can see from the image above, you get 2 settings, to turn on and off chat, and email popups. By default, it is turned off, but within a few moments you can be rocking the desktop popup goodness.
This is a great move on Google’s behalf, and it makes our lives much easier. I just wish we had more control over the look of the popups, but since that is a strictly cosmetic difference, I will survive somehow without it. It looks like its limited to just chrome, but hopefully in the future, this HTML5 Technology will bleed down to the other browsers. For more information, check out the Gmail Blog here.
