Google has just launched desktop notifications for Gmail using HTML5 technology. Of course, they’ve had a separate pop-up notifier for quite a while now. How does this one compare?

Improvements:

• Will run on any operating system.
• Doesn’t need to be installed on your computer.
• Doesn’t require a registry hack now that GMail requires SSL on everything.
• Doesn’t require you to enter your login & password in a separate app.
• Lets you choose between only chat notifications, only email notifications, or both.
• If you use Priority Inbox, lets you choose between all new messages or only those PI has marked as Important.

Downside:

• Needs Gmail to be open. No biggie, as this is true of pop-up notifications for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. But since the old notifier was a separate app, it could run on its own.
• Only works with Chrome so far.