How new browser technology makes webmail efficient

The way we use internet has changed significantly over the years. The HTML technology did not evolve with the time. Browser companies improved their product but common standard was not developed. This changed with new HTML5 technology. This standard is now adopted by most of the popular browsers on PC as well as mobile. HTML5 is designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs.

HTML5 also helped email service providers to make their webmail more efficient. Traditionally users preferred mail clients like outlook over browser based webmail as mail clients offered many features such as offline viewing of mails, drag and drop, etc. With new HTML5 standard the feature gap between webmail and mail clients has narrowed significantly.

Offline access to mails
HTML5 offers a local storage for each web based application. The data stored in local store is available even when internet connection is not available. Webmail use this functionality to store mails for offline view. So like outlook, you can view your mails even when you are not connected to internet.

Drag and drop
One of the most useful functionality in mail client is that you can drag a mail in inbox and drop it on the folder you want to it move to. It helped to organise the inbox with simple mouse action. HTML5 allows grabbing any object in the webpage and dropping it over another object. Webmail utilises this functionality to support dragging an individual mail and dropping it over a folder in folder list

Instant messaging
Internet technology always strived to achieve most natural form of communication i.e. real time communication. Real time communication through text or video chat was achieved by individual companies using their proprietary protocols. HTML5 has inbuilt support for two users to communicate with each user on HTML5 compliant browsers without any need to download a software or plugin. Integrated text and video chat support is been used by webmail to add instant messaging facility

Better user interface
With HTML5 it is possible to embed video and audio, high quality drawings, charts and animation and many other rich content without using any plugins and third party programs as the functionality is built into the browser. You can now read a document, watch a video or listen to songs without navigating away from your mailbox.

Truly efficient
HTML5 introduced a functionality called app-cache. It means the common elements in web application including any data will be stored in your browser. These elements need not be downloaded again. This saves lot of bandwidth utilized in downloading same content again and again.

To deliver a new mail automatically, webmail used to poll the servers in a periodic intervals. Using websockets functionality of HTML5, continuous polling to servers in webmail can be avoided

Similarly, HTML5 offers better web design options with new CSS3 style sheets.

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