Google Joins the Offline Web Application Bandwagon

Google has released an interesting new open source browser plug-in named Gears, which holds the potentially to take any web application offline. As a first example, Google has implemented offline functionality on Google Reader. Once you’ve installed Gear plug-in, you’ll be able to run Google Reader in an offline mode by downloading the last 2000 items. Your actions will be automatically synced with the Google Reader whenever you go online again, which means, if you’ve started an article in an offline mode, it’ll be started in the online mode as well.

With Gears, Google has just joined the Adobe and Microsoft in solving the offline web application problem. Apollo from Adobe and Silverlight from Microsoft are both projects with similar goals, but unlike both of them, Google Gears is an extension for IE and Firefox which doesn’t require web developers to learn a whole new platform, since Gears is just a set of three new simple APIs for Javascript. One gripe is that Opera and Safari aren’t supported yet.

Speaking about the three new APIs, Gears basically introduces a simple programmatic caching interface for caching the frequently used interfaces, an embedded SQL database (a thin wrapper around the SQLite database) and finally, an API for light weight process.

I don’t know if it’s just me and people around me, but I happen to use atleast three different computers (including my laptop) almost every day, thought I primarily work off my laptop. One of the coolest things about web apps, as far as I’m concerned is that I can use Gmail from any machine, despite the fact that a rich email client like Thunderbird ( or god forbid, Outlook ) can give me a gazillion more features and extensions. With something like Gears or Apollo or Silverlight, I think, it becomes a tad bit too easy for developers to go over board and tie users down to single machine. Used wisely, Gears can enhance the user experience for rich internet applications considerably, but there is also a significant potential for mess use by developers. Like all new technologies, it seems to be a double edged sword.