GTalk is a fantastic tool and Google Talk Gadget is clearly more usable than the stand-alone GTalk desktop client or the floating AJAX version in GMail. With Google Talk Gadget, each chat session opens up as a tab (like Firefox browser tabs), it can show previews of images or video and the chat client can easily be embedded inside webpages.

But with every great tool, there are obviously downsides.   We may have browser windows in front of us all the time, the same may not hold true for the webpage (like the Google personalized page) where we have embedded the GTalk gadget.

So here’s an alternate option – put the Google Talk client in the Firefox sidebar so it always stays in the foreground no matter what website you are on. To add Google Talk to your Firefox sidebar, bookmark the following URL ( right-click and choose Bookmark this link )

Now go to Bookmarks menu, navigate to the above bookmark, right click and choose Properties. Tick the checkbox that says Load this bookmark in the sidebar.

Tags | General, Google