Gmail in the browser is, in my experience, better than Skype. The voice and video chat worked flawlessly from San Francisco to the Philippines where under the exact same circumstances Skype stuttered and failed for video conferencing.

Also - Gmail in the browser is integrated with Google Voice and Google Chat, so you don't have to suffer through Skype's client just to chat. And in fact you can continue chatting over your phone through SMS (for free) because Google Voice is awesome.

Hunting down browser tabs or detached browser windows is not my idea of a good chat user interface.

Google chat uses Jabber, so any Jabber compatible client will work (ie all of them)

As much as I wanted to like jabber (I gave it a fair chance with openfire for almost a year), there are multiple problems, namely:

1. Audio and Video calls do not work with "any compatible client". I have in fact never gotten them to work at all.

2. Most jabber clients are awful and buggy.

3. Jabber support in multi-protocol clients is even more awful and buggy.

4. Nobody uses it, at least over here in europe.

5. Everybody over here uses Skype. If there was a reliable way to bridge jabber<->skype then I would bite and switch again.

1. Yea, for Audio/Video you need to go to the browser (but the browser is IMHO better than Skype for A/V)

2 & 3. ICQ, AIM (I think), iChat, Trillian... Etc. I like all of them.

4. At least in the States everyone uses Gmail (most everyone in SV that is)

5. Skype is prevalent in the work environment, I just don't know why. It sucks pretty hard and everyone hates it.

Just my opinion, I have had great success with Gmail/Google Voice and iChat (for chat with my Gmail Jabber account)