7 Comments

Firefox 3 to support offline web application support

February 12, 2007 by in Cool,Tech with 7 Comments

Read/WriteWeb [via] has an interesting and promising article that supports the idea that Firefox 3 will offer offline support for everyones favorite web apps including Gmail among others.

An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you’ll be able to use your web apps – like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc – in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google’s hands.

Looks like Firefox is going to play an integral role in squashing the idea that consumers should have to pay for productivity software. Farewell Microsoft Office, I won’t miss you. Will anyone else? Aside from the corp. zombies forced into using the MS line, who else is going to miss being locked to an application?


  • ClaMs

    Well I think I will somewhat ,miss it. I will never be able to miss a deadline and say “I’m very sorry but Word crashed on me last night.”

    People usually can relate to your MS problems. Other then that, good ridance.

    This will also help blur the line between Mac and PC users. We can all use the EXACT same application in the future. This gives me a smile.

  • Alan Rager

    Aww, but you forget: Openoffice already offers a great multi-platform MS Office alternative, and it’s open source, to boot. I haven’t used MS office for years now, ever since finding it on a linux install I tried out.

  • Don Wilson

    Goodbye Office? Isn’t this what was said when Google Docs came out? What happened? Oh right, he’s puny compared to MS Office.

  • Don Wilson

    he = it

  • Brian

    MS office is not going anywhere, I don’t even think google can make that happen.

    MS Office 2k7!

  • chad

    I have seen an implementation of an online calendar app with this kinda functionality. It was quite smooth… if you could stay using that kind of functionality on other apps I would def. Love to see it. With all this in sight though I wonder how the browser wars will heat up and what kind of new technologies we will see as the idea of “anywhere apps” as I’ve started calling them continue to gain momentum.

    And last but not least I part with this statment

    *sigh* job security feels goooood

  • Hax

    hey guys, seriously: aren’t we all online all the time?
    for what exactly would we need offline support for web apps? to speed our torrents up or what? ;)

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