Here is a quick difference between the two different versions of Google talk offered by Google. You can get a quick glance before really trying out these two software’s and based on these you can plan out which application can be useful to you.
Google Talk Setup – 1.5Mb
Google Talk Labs Edition Setup – 457Kb
The Google talk normal version would download the whole installation stuff to your computer and then directly run, on the other hand the Labs edition would download some files during the installation process. Once the installation is completed you will find the Instant Messenger to launch automatically with the Labs edition having a fixed size with no scrolling option to increase the height of the IM.
Once you login to the Google Talk Labs edition you will find that all your Online & Offline friends can be seen on a single screen and you cannot scroll down to check out all the list of your friends on your instant messenger, this is seriously a bad feature because i always have around 50 people online in Google talk and hundreds offline but with this option i can just see the first few people and not others. In the normal version of Google Talk we can view everyone by moving the schroller downwards.
In the Labs edition you save up some of your desktop space because all your chat conversations are not displayed in different chat windows but it shows in different tabs in the main messenger itself, something like the browser tabs. The messages sent through the Labs version were very much delayed for us and many a times didnt deliver because it was continuously disconnecting and reconnecting. The most important features which we missed in the Google Talk Labs edition was Call a Friend & Send Files , which is really useful because in the normal Google Talk Client we can directly call any other Gtalk people for free of cost and also send or receive any files between different users.
Only thing which can be a good for people who are migrating to Google from Yahoo! Messenger is that they get Smileys feature activated in the Google Labs Edition. Decide which of these two would be useful to you and based on this you can download the instant messenger.
Is google working on gtalk for linux (ubuntu)?
where is the sign out option in gtalk lab edition
Right click the balloon on right bottom side of task bar (near clock). You will get an option for SIGN OUT.
Please inform to me if not found.
Hi,
There are some other features in google labs Edition Group chatting, invisible mode is available. Is there any other feature?
regards,
swami
how to show the list of all contacts instead of just one page in the GTalk Lab Edition?
One other disadvantage of using labs edition is, you cannot copy the text from the messenger window.