Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Google Docs finally getting offline - Firefox 3 users left aside

Google is finally enabling offline access to Google Docs and for it Google Apps users, Google released much touted Google Gears to enable seamless online and offline access of web applications but failed to unleash the power of it. Till now only Google Reader is the application which is Gears enabled. But Google is now rolling out offline access to Google Word Processor, Google Spreadsheets but Spreadsheets will get only view access not editing.. Why give view access to people, we can just have a local copy to work with which will be better than your apps. Although they have no plans to get Presentations offline as yet.

Zoho was the first company to port its Zoho Writer - Word processor application to gears much before Google even think of it.

They are rolling the feature out for all users and it will take about 3 weeks to be enabled.

Even though offline access is enabled for Google Docs, it will still be useless for people using Firefox 3 because no Google addon supports Firefox 3 except Google notebook.

Google needs to be quick to support Firefox 3, they are kinda slow these days.

Firefox 3 is in beta does not mean it is not stable, it is fast, has low memory footprint and best of the world features, If google is waiting to port the addons because firefox 3 is in beta then even 70% of google products are in beta.. We need addons to be ported to Forefox 3.


-Abhiz

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