In October, 2005, Lifehacker showed us how to make Gmail, in your web browser, be your default mail app on your Mac. That is, when you click on a mailto link in a Web page, a Gmail window pops up, allowing you to write your email. Once sent, the window or tab closes itself and it’s back to surfing like normal.

Here’s a direct link to the Google Notifier, which you’ll need.

And, for the record, I disabled the notifier’s actually checking anything for me. It just sits there allowing my preference for a Web page to be my default continue on, even after I’ve launched Mail.app for whatever reason.

UPDATE: here are instructions directly from Google on how to make this work. Seems it works for Windows, too.