We talked a bit in the last post about data storage out in “the cloud” that is the Internet. Well of course “cloud computing” is not restricted to just data storage, as it also includes all the online applications that are available on the Internet.  This includes email applications like Gmail (my personal favourite) and Yahoo mail etc., but also all the online office applications like Google Docs and its various and growing number of online rivals.

I am a great fan of some of these applications, and Gmail has become my de facto home email client and I rarely now use an email  application like Outlook or Thunderbird.  This is not the case at work where the email client is standard, and I have no choice.  With Gmail though I have always had one gripe and that was that although I regarded Gmail as my default mail client my computer didn’t! So when ever I clicked on a mailto:  link on a website my browser would always try and start an email client and not use Gmail.

Well today I found a tip on the Google Mail blog which shows a new feature in Firefox 3 which means I can set up the browser to always use Gmail as the default email application, meaning I will no longer have this problem.  This should will also work for you if you use another email application either on your computer of in the cloud!  Great huh!

Do you use online applications a lot?