iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google's Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.
Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto's purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.
"We're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears," the company said on an explanatory Web site. "If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster."
Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it--among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace--are the exception rather than the rule.
Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto's financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto's chief operating officer.
"It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let's face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more," Thompson said. "Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I'll save on bandwidth."
The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. "We did this on our own," with Web programmers jumping on the project because "it's sexy for them to work on it."
iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests--and that's with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a "tiny portion of our traffic," he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock's Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.
The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients--photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users' hard drives don't get too cluttered.
"It's a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly," Thompson said. One of his developers described it as "the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn't free, (but) every subsequent hit is."
Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.
HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems' Flash technology.
"We'd love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it's probably a ways out," Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.
IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it's still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.
People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson's taste--or plans.
"We announced we'd drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I'm not sure we're going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping--just not quite fast enough," he said.
From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.
(Credit: Net Applications)According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.
iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple's Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google's Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.
Among iStockphoto's IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.
"We've seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We're hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly," Thompson said. "For us, even though it's a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can't cut them off at the knees."
"I think we're dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise--not to mention we're 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place" among operating systems, Thompson said.
For those who use Firefox 3.5 but also want to use Gmail with no network connection, Google has an answer: a new version of its Gears plug-in.
Gears endows browsers with some new abilities, including accessing some Web applications even while a computer is offline and juggling multiple simultaneous tasks more effectively. And using Gears, Google last week began letting people see their location on Google Maps by clicking the small circle below the navigation controller and above the zoom controller.
Major updates to Mozilla's open-source browser often break add-on compatibility, and the earlier version of Gears wouldn't work with the newly released Firefox 3.5. The new Gears 0.5.29.0 fixes that.
Users of Mac OS X and Windows can click the "install" button at Google's Gears Web site. The new version is spreading to Mozilla's add-on site, too.
Clicking the Offline Beta link gets the installation started.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)When Google announced that Google Calendar users could read events even while not connected to a network, the feature was only for organizations using Google Apps for their Internet domains. Now the offline calendar feature can be used more broadly, though.
The feature is available by clicking the "Offline Beta" link in the upper right side of the page. Clicking on it walks the user through an installation and initial synchronization process.
As with offline Gmail, the service uses Google's Gears software to store a copy of the calendar data on a person's computer so it can accessed while the network is down. Unlike the Gmail version, new items can't be created or modified while offline.
Offline Gmail is available only in some English-speaking countries; it wasn't immediately clear how widespread offline Gmail Calendar access is.
(Via Google Operating System.)
Google explains what offline Google Calendar enables during the installation.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Google Calendar's offline features relies on Google's open-source Gears software.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Once installed, Google Calendar synchronizes its locally stored data with that on the Web site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google's online tools a bit more competitive for business users.
The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.
The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.
Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google's Offline Calendar FAQ page.
As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person's computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.
"Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon," according to the FAQ.
Update 8:46 a.m. PST: Google confirmed it's begun activating the offline support. It will be available for customers using the free, ad-supported Standard Edition of Google Apps and the Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year, Google said.
Update 8:59 a.m. PST: Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager, discussed the offline Calendar move at the Google Enterprise blog.
Google declined to say when read-write access will arrive or when offline calendars will arrive for ordinary Google Calendar users. "We've seen the strongest interest in this feature from our enterprise users, so we're bringing it to them first," spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.
Wondering how Gmail offline works? Here, we walk you through it.
In short, people familiar with Gmail already are mostly familiar with its offline incarnation, which Google said it's releasing gradually to its users in coming days. The biggest difference is of course that you can't see new messages, and e-mails that you send are merely queued up until they can be delivered when a network connection is re-established.
Gmail uses Google's Gears technology, which among other things lets browsers store data on a computer in what's called a local cache. I'm using Firefox 3.1 beta 2, with which Gears isn't compatible, so to access Gmail offline I used Google Chrome instead, which has Gears built in. Since Gears is a relative rarity, though, most folks will have to install it first, which Google walks you through.
There are some limitations to offline Gmail: Only about 10,000 messages will be downloaded--the newest and most recently used. You can't use the contacts tab to manage your connections, though e-mail address autocomplete works so you won't need to worry about remembering e-mail addresses. You can't include attachments on new messages. It's only available in Gmail for English speakers.
But overall, it's certainly worth it if you're ever on a plane, taxi, train, vacation retreat, or coffee shop with an overstressed connection.
... Read more
Significantly increasing the utility and competitiveness of its Web-based e-mail service, Google is enabling an experimental ability to read, write, and search Gmail messages even while not connected to the network.
Google believes almost religiously in cloud computing, the idea that computer applications and data live on the Internet rather than on PCs. But there are times when the network is inaccessible, and generally Web-based applications like today's Gmail effectively seize up under those circumstances.
Offline sidesteps that problem, the classic example being a busy executive traveling on a plane. And offline Gmail access begins a new chapter for Google's ambition to appeal to business customers for services such as Google Apps, of which Gmail is a component.
"This is a feature we've heard loud and clear the enterprise wants," said Todd Jackson, Gmail's product manager.
In coming days, Google will let Gmail users test the Web-based e-mail service even when there's no network.
(Credit: Google)Trying to sign up business customers generally means wooing them away from the dominant e-mail products, Microsoft's Exchange server software and Outlook PC software. Google and Microsoft began in separate spheres, but are ever-closer competitive rivals, each with a strong cash-generating business that can be used to subsidize forays into other markets.
There's more, too. Google Apps customers will get another major offline option "soon," too: Google Calendar access, though not initially the ability to create new entries. If the organization's administrator enables the "New Features" option, each person within that organization will get access to the calendar, Google said.
New features help make Gmail more compelling for business customers, but for many, a bigger problem is the fact that Gmail still sports its beta tag, said Gartner analyst David Smith.
"That's one of the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses," Smith said. "You're hard-pressed to find any businesses who decide to go into production with anything that a vendor calls beta, no matter how good it is." Google promises customers will get 99.9 percent availability through a service level agreement for Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.
Cloud vs. PC
And Microsoft, while not turning on a dime, isn't counting on a future that consists exclusively of PC-based Office. It already has a product, Office Live Workspace that lets users share and view--but not edit--Office documents online, and the next version of Office will run in a browser.
Philosophically, though, Microsoft remains firmly tethered to the PC, while Google wants to move as fast as possible to Web-based applications.
"We think the browser is the ideal platform for deploying all kinds of applications. That's where Google is placing its bet," Jackson said. "But people are traditionally limited by the speed and connectivity of the Internet. We want to fill in those gaps."
Google already developed open-source technology called Gears that helps further this cloud computing agenda by storing Web data on PC, and Gmail, used by millions, could help coax more people to install Gears. That, in turn, could help solve the chicken-and-egg problem that currently means it's not worthwhile for most Web application programmers to build in Gears support.
Greater Gears support could help other cloud-computing companies, including Zoho, which already has offline access for its Web-based e-mail application.
It's not as if offline Gmail were completely impossible. People can set up software such as Outlook or Thunderbird to read and write e-mails, for example. But offline Gmail means people won't have to learn a new interface.
Offline Gmail has been in testing for months, though Jackson wouldn't share specifics about exactly how long.
What can offline Gmail do?
"We wanted the user experience to be almost identical to the experience you get when you're online," Jackson said.
Offline Gmail stores a copy of a user's inbox on a personal computer. Most people will have to install it, a process Google walks you through, but it's built into Google's Chrome browser.
Once Gears is installed and offline access is enabled, the software automatically detects when a person's network connection is working. If the network is good, Gmail works as usual. If it's bad, it goes into offline mode, sending unsent messages and retrieving new ones when the connection is restored.
And if the network is dodgy, a person can use the intermediate "flaky connection mode," which for example queues a message to be sent immediately by storing it to the hard drive then actually sends it as soon as it can. Google positions this as useful for coffee shops and poaching a neighbor's weak-signal wireless network, but I think of this as "tech conference mode."
When enabled, offline Gmail begins by downloading, in the background, a copy of a user's archive to the user's personal computer. But the software stores about 10,000 e-mails, so heavy users won't get a complete archive.
Gmail automatically updates the local cache of messages with new and recently read items and with messages associated with a particular label on which a person has clicked, Jackson said.
Imperfect
Not everything works, though.
One big missing piece is the ability to add attachments to new messages, though attachments are visible with existing messages.
Another is the contacts tab, so forget about managing e-mail lists or adding new addresses while offline. The autocomplete option works, though, so there's no need to start remembering e-mail addresses.
English-speaking Gmail users will be able to enable offline access as Google gradually adds the ability over the next "couple" of days, said Gmail engineer Andy Palay in a blog post. "Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don't be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven't been completely ironed out yet," Palay said.
What kinds of problems occur?
"We've seen issues with the local cache getting out of sync. You have to refresh the browser, and that gets you going again," Jackson said. "In some rare circumstance, it has to be fully flushed, so we ask to disable and re-enable the feature."
But these should be unusual problems, he said: "It's been in testing for awhile on all 20,000 Googlers, so it's gotten some good testing."
It was probably inevitable given what Google did with Gears, but Yahoo said Tuesday it's releasing BrowserPlus software as open-source software.
BrowserPlus and Gears are aimed at improving browsers' native abilities so Web applications can better match those running natively on a computer's operating system, and Gears already is open-source software. Yahoo announced its intent to make BrowserPlus open-source software on its Yahoo Developers Blog on Tuesday.
"Openness is a key initiative and a major theme for Yahoo this year and beyond, and open-sourcing BrowserPlus is part of that commitment," said team member Lloyd Hilaiel. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Our hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers. I'd like to see BrowserPlus become a valuable piece of Internet infrastructure."
Hilaiel also pointed to a number of feature ideas people have suggested.
"Folks on the forums are talking about peer-to-peer support. People are suggesting screen capture technology for better bug reporting. Webcam integration! Easy import of calendaring data! Drag-and-drop of Word documents! BitTorrent! There's no shortage of ideas. Mainly I'm excited to see what the community creates in the coming weeks and months," he said.
He also drew some distinctions between BrowserPlus and Gears. "Gears is attempting to accelerate the evolution of the Web by enabling features with wide appeal that can be implemented everywhere. BrowserPlus is more interested in fixing the Web plug-in environment, making rapid experimentation possible," he said.
BrowserPlus is a framework with a variety of plug-ins; a new version released earlier in November debuted a plug-in to use computer's motion sensors, for example. The plug-in architecture is designed to let Web site designers add new abilities to Web pages without requiring people to restart their browsers. With the new version, anyone may use BrowserPlus framework, which previously had been confined to some Yahoo Web sites.
Yahoo has improved its BrowserPlus technology for more sophisticated Web applications and now lets other Web sites besides its own use it, the company said.
BrowserPlus, like Google's Gears, is software that can be plugged into a person's Web browser to make Web-based applications work more like native desktop programs.
One key feature, for example, is a better upload interface that gets around the tedious requirement at most Web sites that people individually select each photo, video, or other file to be uploaded. Another is desktop notifications, letting a Web-based e-mail, calendar, or instant messaging application notify a person of a new message or event reminder, for example.
Yahoo debuted BrowserPlus in May, but it released a new version quietly on Friday. New features include some ability to store data on the user's computer, which also is one of Gears' big selling points, and "playful support for motion sensors...on specific laptops," Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo's BrowserPlus team said in a blog posting Monday.
Yahoo apparently is hoping the features will increase adoption of the software. "It makes it possible for anyone to use BrowserPlus on their own Web site to implement better in-browser uploading and desktop notifications," Hilaiel said. Previously, BrowserPlus only would work with sites such as Yahoo's Flickr.
The company also bills BrowserPlus as a desirable plug-in framework: once users have it installed, people can let Web sites add new abilities to their browsers without having to restart their browsers. Right now, though, only Yahoo may supply the plug-ins.
Current BrowserPlus plug-ins include features to enable image editing, drag-and-drop operations, PStore for storing data, and an interface for an operating system's text-to-speech engine.
Because BrowserPlus, like Gears, is a narrowly used project, Web site designers can't count on it being installed, but they can offer some new features to people who do have it running.
Those who want to try it out can check Yahoo's BrowserPlus developer site, also newly launched.
Google has updated its open-source Gears project so Web sites can take advantage of location services in Gears-enabled Web browsers.
The underlying technology, which used signals from cell phone towers, was initially developed so mobile-phone users could get a rough fix on their location, even without GPS technology. Now, though, Gears has been augmented with location smarts based on signals from Wi-Fi networks so that people with laptops also can figure out their location to within about 200 meters in many major cities.
That means that a Web site that might benefit from showing a person's location--most anything mapping-related, for example--can be personalized better, as long as there are wireless network signals around. Google uses Gears to try to advance the Web application state of the art, but only a small fraction of users have it installed.
Also, programmers don't need to know which underlying mechanism provides the service. "Because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop and mobile browsers, you can even use the same code on both platforms," Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google mobile team, said in the Google Code Blog post Tuesday.
Gears is an extension that augments the ability of Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari. But it's not the only way to get geographic information into a browser.
Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user's location. That service is being built into Firefox 3.1, too, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS or presumably Gears, to retrieve location information.
Sharing one's location information with Web sites, of course, raises privacy concerns, but as with Mozilla's Firefox extension, those sites must obtain explicit information.
"Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time, and the user can either allow or deny your site permission," Wiles said.
Update 12:33 p.m. PDT: The Wi-Fi location feature also is now built into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps for Mobile, according to Google's Mobile blog.
"The premise is similar to what we do with cell tower information: information transmitted by nearby Wi-Fi access points is used to pinpoint your location," said Adel Youssef and Arunesh Mishra, programmers for Google mobile. "Since the range of a Wi-Fi access point is smaller than that of a cell phone tower, this often results in a much more accurate position."
Zoho Mail, out of private beta testing, works on the Apple iPhone.
(Credit: Zoho)Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple's iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.
The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications' limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.
Offline access, which in Zoho's case is enabled with Google's Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. "Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox," the company said Friday in an announcement.
Easier said than done, perhaps: I just got an indefinite "Loading..." message in both Google Chrome and in Gears-enabled Firefox when trying to access my mail after I shut off my network.
(Update 10:30 a.m. PDT: I thought I'd gone through the offline settings properly, but evidently I hadn't. It does in fact work, mostly, caching messages on my PC and automatically adapting according to whether there's a network. I could write new mails, though Zoho Mail only saves them to the draft folder instead of queuing them up to be sent. And when I tried to reply to an e-mail, I got the error message, "Sorry, this feature is not supported while you are offline!")
And mobile support, while difficult given the primitive state of most mobile devices' Web browsers, can also help when people don't have access to a PC or a Wi-Fi network. "We do plan to support other mobile devices soon," Zoho said. The application worked fine on my iPhone.
Zoho Mail can be accessed with other e-mail clients using the POP (Post Office Protocol) today; the more powerful IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support is "coming soon."
It has no storage limits or ads. Users can opt to organize mail with either labels, a la Gmail, or Folders, a la Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And back-and-forth exchanges can be viewed either with Outlook's conventional style or Gmail's conversation view. Also adopted are some Outlook keyboard shortcuts, such as Control-Enter to send a message. The application worked for me, though I missed Yahoo Mail's drag-and-drop abilities and Gmail's stand-out filtering options.
People who sign up for the e-mail get a "username@zoho.com" e-mail address. And through the AdventNet subsidiary's business offering, customers can use Zoho Mail with their own domain.
Zoho's Web-based e-mail client uses Google's Gears to enable offline access to messages. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET News)
