Getting Chrome running in Ubuntu is now pretty easy, simple add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main
Then you can install Chrome using the package manager and it will keep itself updated. Sadly the browser is quite alpha (no flash, random errors, no tabs saving on exit) but they update it every week and it runs insanely fast compared to firefox.
Google gears has been touted as the answer to offline web applications, but so far very few sites have adopted it. Maybe its because exactly what makes web applications great is the fact that you can communicate with people in real time, or maybe its because adopting a non-trivial web site to work with gears is a very significant task, or maybe its because gears was never bundled with a browser by default (until now).
One area where it really makes sense is for email. Google of course realized this, but it took them a complete phone stack before they actually did it 🙂 The only other thing that I use geagle for wordpress, but that’s only speeding it up. So contrary to the gmail integration it doesn’t allow you to read, modify and post while offline.
Even with the ubiquity of fast wireless 3G connections coupled with netbooks, the offline support is a welcome change to gmail and only adds to the already long list of reasons for using gmail. It still amazes me that google was able to deliver a new email client at a time when at least I thought the webmail race was over. It really just goes to show that building rock-solid products is still king. Not just time to marked. And that is really good news for the ones of us that still care about that 🙂