You would be able to find offline GMail in the Google Labs tab in your GMail settings. For more details have a look here.

I’m probably not the right customer for this as I’m always online if I sit in-front of a computer but maybe this allows my wife to switch. She’s the one using the laptop. I will still give it a good go though. Who knows, the next internet-cable-cut maybe just around the corner.

I think this is a huge and important step for Google. If this works it is the corner stone that will be used to gun for Microsoft Office. This technology can then finally replace office software completely. Even companies could now join in (provided you’re not bound by legal issues of storing information off-site). I hope Google will be clever enough to provide this as one of their appliance kits as they do with their search-pizza-boxes. I know I’d love to leave Exchange behind too.

What is amasing though is the quick and professional responses that you get most of the time. Although these are mostly Open Source products they still have a LOT of professionalism going for them. Something I can’t really say for a lot of products that cost several arms & legs. But I’m getting off-topic….

Firefox 3.1… what can I say…. FAST, very FAST, did I mention FAST? The other things Firefox 3.1 brings are mostly of secondary interest to me. Since I use GMail, Google Calendar and other online programs I do depend on the speed of Java Script and the rendering. This version does wonders for that. I’ll keep the memory footprint in the corner of my eye though….

So if yer feel’n a li’ll adventeris taday try ye on fir size.

[Update] Looks like the Better GMail plug-in doesn’t quite work correctly. It doesn’t allow to send email.

Google churns out new Gmail features on a regular basis. The newest one arrived in my mailbox today. It is Themes for Google mail. Purely a visual thing but under the Settings-Theme tab you can now choose from a good two dozen designs. I think it’s great. Gmail was getting a little long in the tooth. So no matter what design you prefer I’m sure there’s an option now.

My current favourite is Shiny. So have fun with yours!

But seriously…. Google’s success is not it’s advertising, search engine or Gmail but the scalable architecture of their datacentres and the centres themselves. Nobody can currently take it up with them. They are often compared to the Borg of Star Trek. Somehow in server terms that might really be correct.

Anyway… the data centres of Google are (from what does get to the public) built on triple redundancy and cheapest hardware. Some pictures and really cool figures are available [here]. The figures are probably a tad old but they highlight what dimensions we’re talking about and they are big. Really big.

They use Apple‘s WebKit as a base rendering engine and put some -admittedly good- fluff around it. But what I don’t get is why they make another one. They would have been much more effective teaming up with Apple and Safari or the FireFox guys. It would have left the browser landscape untouched. This now adds yet again another thing you need to test when developing web applications. The cost alone worldwide to web development projects will be in the hundreds of millions. Just because Google thought it would be cool to have their own browser. I wonder if they ever thought of the follow-on-effect of their actions.

The only hope I have is that the WebKit engine they use remains unchanged. That would mean testing Chrome would test Safari and the other way round. That remains to be seen once the browser is out in the wild.

The ideas Google have and what they are trying to do is great but it’s just the wrong way. This smacks of a Microsoft stratagem and I also believe it will have a Microsoftish feel to it aka somewhat stale and big monopoly like.

As a tester I hope they will still come to their senses. We have enough browsers to have healthy competition and we have more than enough browsers to give testers a royal headache. So please not another cool browser!!!

Anyway a couple of weeks ago I delved into using Google Analytics for this site. The product is amazing for a free product. Statistics are well presented and of good use in analysing what’s happening on your page. The down side is that now Google knows too. In the end it comes down to what you want them to know.

The “Free” does have a price then. It is the loss of some data that belongs to you. I personally do not find it too tragic. Well, my site is not the most frequented and I don’t think Google will really care.

What I like most in Google analytics is the informative dashboard. It gives all information that is needed. If something peaks your interest just drill down into the data, compare time periods or do a heap of other things.