I Hate Mailto: Links
Posted 10 months ago at 10:43 am. 13 comments
Why oh why were they ever created? Clicking on a mailto link, in my opinion, is like walking on a landmine and blowing off your leg. It’s a nasty little devil disguised like all of the other links, that manages to consume your system resources by opening up an email client.
I wish that my browser would somehow prevent mailto links from consuming my system like a parasite, without being intrusive and obnoxious. For example, the website North X East has a nice collection of links on the top right portion of the site, and the last one (the advertise link) is actually a mailto trap, luring unsuspecting site users into a sinister bait-and-switch disaster.
I want Firefox to let me know that it’s a mailto link long before I click it. Maybe that gentle and soft, friendly creme colored bar could smoothly slide down from the upper portion of the viewfinder and compassionatly alert me that there was a mailto link on the page, and that I should look out for it (then, it would use some nifty witchcraft to have the mailto link glow red and maybe even ultimately disappear).
I leave you with a quote from Caddyshack: “A flute without holes, is not a flute. A donut without a hole, is a Danish.”
So I inspired this? Amazing.
Heh. Isn’t there a way to make em open with Gmail? I think there is.
I used to hate them with a passion, but ever since I’ve been using Thunderbird, it opens lightning fast (OS X) and I can close it without losing more than a couple of seconds.
I have the habit of subconciously checking what kind of link I’m about to click on by quickly glancing at the activity bar (bottom bar of your browser). This way I always can be prepared for Mail.app to fire up, and avoid if necessary.
I mean sure they are horrible if your system isn’t configured for them. I use thunderbird so I never have a problem. But if you are hardcore into gmail then using the gmail tools you can configure your browser to redirect to a gmail compose screen upon clicking on a mailto link. Why is that such a bad thing?
Just add
a[href^=”mailto:”]:before {
content: “\2709 ”
}
to userContent.css in your Firefox profile’s chrome folder, and you get a nice little envelope symbol in front of a mailto link.
Similarly, you can change colors etc., too, if you like.
I leave you with a quote from Caddyshack: “A flute without holes, is not a flute. A donut without a hole, is a Danish.”
RIGHT ON POINT!
I think you should try this : https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/3199.
Kind regards,
Anthony
Anthony beat me to the punch, but there’s also a GreaseMonkey script that does the same thing. God bless Firefox extensions. Excuse me… addons.
that’s why it will never wor. Zaid Bethanie.
Wouldn’t it be possibly to simply create a Firefox extension to do this?
I say simply, but what I really mean is: “Creating Firefox extensions confuses the hell out of me, but someone else might be considerate enough to make one for the rest of us!” lol
just switch to the best browser in the world - opera. or look at the status bar before you click any links - i usually do out of habit - though they could change what appears in the status bar with a window.status= code, but it’s pretty uncommon. seriously though, switch to opera. it kicks firefoxes ass. (though firefox is slowly adding add-ons to be more opera-like, mouse gestures and the like…)
Come on…they’re not THAT bad….
PHP Contact Forms ftw.