I believe they only started rolling it out to a wide audience this week. You were just an unwitting beta tester. :)

I kind of wish they'd taken the opportunity to clean up the toolbar items. They still have separate links for each type of search, even though they switched to a unified search page months ago. And they're not distinguished from other services (at least once a week, I have a moment when I suddenly think "what's Google…

Perfect timing. I just got my first Android phone a few days ago.

As a skin developer for Rainmeter, I hear this criticism a lot. To my ear, it's like saying "I don't drive anywhere, so why would I want a car?" You might find that you spend more time looking at your desktop if there were something there to look at. ;)

This is very good advice. I've lost count of how many email exchanges I've had where an emoticon (especially used to indicate a joke) would have averted a horrible misunderstanding.

I would guess it's to cover private Google Apps domains. (Chrome extensions only give you two options for declaring website permissions: a specific list of domains, or "all.")

Wish I had something better than a blank wall behind my laptop.

Really? I love it. I think it's made all three of those browsers better than they would have been if one had permanently monopolized the market. Indeed, I often wish desktop OSes were competitive like this, instead of having none but the complacent victor and the radical niches.

I think that's sort of the idea. You don't know what "version" of Chrome you're using, you're just using "Chrome." And that's how they want it. Mozilla seems to be leaning in that direction now.

Exactly. I usually have four windows open at any given time: Trillian, Gmail, Google Reader, and TweetDeck. Those probably cover 85% of my Internet communications.

Chrome does, however, cause pinned tabs to flash periodically when they've been updated.

As a longtime Firefox user who's feeling more tempted by Chrome's fruit every day, I'm looking forward to this rant. :)

I've heard tales about people's Google accounts being locked down as a result of using services like Gladinet and Gmail Drive. They could be entirely apocryphal, but if you rely as much on Google services as I do, it's something you should take into account.

Thank you for your contribution.

Try this. (The instructions are for Chrome, but you can do the same thing in Firefox by adding a bookmark with the keyword "tweet".)

@Eduardo Mercado: I used Feedly exclusively for about two months before switching back to vanilla Google Reader. I just wasn't using any of its extra features.

@lorenleah: I don't know much about Plurk, but as for Livejournal, I don't think it's a lack of interest as much as technical capability. LJ is a pretty old system that doesn't have the kind of open APIs that other services would need to integrate it.

@Vogie: As the article describes, Hootsuite and Seesmic are web-based. TweetDeck is available as a Chrome extension.

I'm really liking TweetDeck for Chrome. I'm not a heavy Twitter or Facebook user, but I do like staying on top of updates from both. I find TD satisfying because I get all the features I need without having to install extra software. With Chrome's app shortcut feature, I can basically use it like a desktop app - I get…

@Whitson Gordon: I think the question is about how to open a locally-saved document in Google Docs just by clicking on it (as it would in a regular word processor).