How a Simple Gmail Outage Crashed Google Chrome

Gmail went down yesterday for a relatively short period of time -- service was intermittent for about an hour (compare that to the extended outage of 2009). However, this outage had an unexpected complication: It also caused the Google Chrome browser to crash. On the surface, that appears very odd: Gmail is a service, but Chrome is an app. Sure, they're both Google products, but they do different things -- why would a hiccup in one affect the other? It has to do with sync. If you log into Chrome...