Google has launched this week a technology (I’ll call it technology, as I think “browser extension” doesn’t quite fit here) that allows you to use web applications offline. This is pretty cool stuff - imagine writing all your emails on the way to work, on a bus or train or whatever, using your webmail client, and sending them off once you get to your workplace’s wireless network - much in the same way that you would do today with your email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook. This feature is actually slated to appear on Firefox 3, due out some time later this year, and apparently Mozilla is very happy that Google has moved forward with this. I suppose it will spare them some of the effort of telling the users what it’s for… The same cannot be said about Microsoft though, as this makes Google Apps a little more attractive to business and home users - while not yet available, we can be pretty sure that all Google services will be enabled for Google Gears in the near future.
The first application to make use of this feature is Google Reader, the company’s RSS feed reader. The first time you access Reader with Gears installed, you are asked if you want to enable this feature. If you chose to do so, a small green icon gets added to the menu at the top right of the screen. Click on this icon, and your browser will start downloading items for offline reading (check out the screenshot). After that, you will have 2000 feed items available for offline reading. Embedded items, such as Youtube videos, are not downloaded, and are displayed as grey boxes. Clicking on them will cause the browser to ask
you whether you want to go back online to download the content. Once you reach the end of your offline items, you get shown a little message that tells you have to go back online to get more content. Overall, everything works very smoothly and provides a perfect, “normal” user experience.
This is something that will show up more and more, specially with the release of Firefox 3. Google was quicker than everyone else in releasing their own solution, which should give them a nice advantage over competitors. Their technology is actually a bunch of Javascript libraries, which means that anyone can use Google Gears for their own web apps. While I expect most people will wait to see what happens in Firefox 3 and what Microsoft’s reaction will be, the fact that Google has opened this up under a very permissive BSD license and is cross-browser and cross-platform, will surely get a lot of people interested. Things will get really interesting in this area once we start getting things like Basecamp, Tracks, ActiveCollab, Nozbe, and other great web apps taking full advantage of this kind of technology.
