Webware

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.

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)

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

"We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases," said Google's Jeremy Moskovich.

Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn't connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

The software requires Safari 3.1.1 on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, he said.

Gears already works on Firefox and Internet Explorer; Opera is working on a version for both its desktop and mobile browsers.

(Via Google Operating System.)

Google doesn't deny that it's working on bringing offline access to two major Web applications, Gmail and Calendar, but a sign emerged Thursday that the feature--which would be a major expansion of the applications' utility and competitive threat--is due soon.

"Gears on Gmail and Calendar in approximately 6 weeks. Just had a preview at Google offices. Not sure if it is Google Enterprise only," said Andrew Fogg, chief marketing and strategy officer for Web 2.0 consultancy Kusiri, in a Twitter post Thursday.

Gears, formerly called Google Gears, is an open-source extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer now and Safari and Opera later that, among other things, lets Web browsers store and use data even while offline. That can make Web applications vastly more useful and a more viable replacement for PC-based software such as Microsoft Outlook. With Gears, Google today offers offline editing for its word processing service and offline viewing of its spreadsheet and presentation service.

A view from 2007 that indicated Google work on offline access to Google Calendar.

(Credit: Shared under Creative Commons by Noticias-TIC)

Google Apps competes with Microsoft's Outlook-Exchange combination as well as with many other online and offline applications, including Yahoo's online e-mail application, Zimbra, which already offers offline access to e-mail.

Gmail has won plaudits from some users--I like it myself--but today they can't use it directly unless they're connected to a network, and I spend a lot of time working where there's no access. Of course, with Google's free use of IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol), software such as Mozilla's Thunderbird also can be used to handle e-mail while offline, so it's not as if Gmail users are helpless without a network connection.

Customers who pay $50 per year per user for Google Apps Premier Edition get more storage space, better technical support, and other features. Personally, I'd be surprised if Google restricted offline access only to those customers, in particular because offline access imposes a burden on the local PC, not Google's data centers, and makes the service and Google's cloud computing argument stronger. But it could be an opportunity to sell more subscriptions.

Just yesterday I asked Google about offline access for Gmail and Calendar and they gave me their usual noncommittal reply that more or less indicates it's in the works.

Two tricky things about Gears is deciding what data to cache locally on a computer and how to synchronize data when a network connection is restored, especially with group-edited content such as documents or calendars. There are hints how Google might go about getting around one challenge, though; according to the Google Operating System blog, some users saw a "Use Google Calendar Offline" note last year that said Gears would let a user view and edit the next three months of a calendar.

Fogg also twittered another potentially useful extension of the Google Apps service is under way, support for technology called SyncML that would make it easier to synchronize Gmail contacts with the address books of mobile devices. Newer versions of SyncML also support "push e-mail," which means a mobile device automatically gets new e-mail without having to be commanded to check.

"SyncML for Google contacts next month. Soocial (sic) watchout. My guess: its related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone," Fogg said in the Twitter post.

Update 11:02 a.m. PDT: Google offered an official but vague comment on the Gears work in Calendar and Gmail: "We're working on Gears-enabling a number of our products, but we don't have a specific timeline to announce."

WordPress.com is the latest Web service to get Google Gears support. Now users who log in to their dashboard will notice a new button in the top right-hand corner called "turbo." Clicking it will make use of Google's Gears (which is currently Firefox and IE-only), offloading some of the data from the cloud into your browser cache. In this case, it's the latest 200 files from your WordPress media library, the same files you access to stick into blog posts.

The new 'turbo' button.

A post on the official WordPress blog by creator Matt Mullenweg notes that the feature has been in development for more than a year and that bloggers are going to notice it the most when on a bad Internet connection. In practice, it should speed up writing a new post and make it faster to drop in photos you've already uploaded to the service's cloud storage.

One thing Gears is not being used for in this case is offline access, or a way to let you use the blog authoring tools while away from an Internet connection. Other tools that have taken advantage of Gears include Google Docs, Reader, Remember the Milk, and some Zoho apps. With Gears' recent movements toward providing more than just a cache, we're also seeing services like MySpace use it to speed up its inter-network messaging.

Update: I'm told this feature will be making its way into the next version of WordPress.org, also known as the hosted version of WordPress. You can read about some other things coming to that version (v2.6) here.

If you've got gears installed, hitting the new turbo button will give you this message. Enabling it allows you to get at your media library faster when you're on a bad connection.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google project manager Charles Wiles talks about the mobile version of Google Gears.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Google's Gears platform is still fairly young as far as Web tools go. A year after its launch (today is the one-year anniversary) it's still found only in a handful of Web apps. Its real power is for mobile users, laptop road warriors and, in the case of mobile phones, for people who are in and out of range of cellular data networks. That is, as long as developers spend the time to build Gears into their sites.

At the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Charles Wiles and Andrei Popescu, who work on the Google Gears for mobile project in London, discussed the current state of Gears for mobile, a project they launched into shortly after the release of the desktop version.

While the platform is currently only available for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Wiles noted that the upcoming version of Opera mini and version 9.5 (for desktops) will be Gears enabled. So will Android when devices with the operating system ship later this year.

The main takeaway from the talk is that Gears for mobile phones can solve some of the problems frequently found on mobile Web apps--mainly slow connections and people dropping out of the range of a data connection during data transfer. The example shown was Google Photos, which has a mobile version that's recently become Gears enabled. Users who have a Gears mobile enabled device can download thumbnails and indexes locally, to avoid having to download them the next time they visit. This means Gears enabled pages will load faster as long as they're in your Gears mobile cache.

So what about other platforms? There was no talk of Gears making its way to BlackBerry, although with the mention that it's making its way to an upcoming version of Opera Mini, it should be expected it will make its way on there, too. Also mentioned was Google Maps--in the form of an audience question as to whether the app would receive Gears treatment. Popescu said it would "probably be the last application we'd port," citing that there are many local clients for it on all types of devices, and that fetching that information about a place before a user searches for it does not jibe with the way the service currently works. In the meantime, third-party developers have hacked together their own offline Google Maps solution on the iPhone which will pull down entire city maps and store them locally to let you search around quickly even while away from a solid data connection.

SAN FRANCISCO--MySpace said it's using Google's Gears, software for augmenting Web browser abilities, to make the social-networking site easier to use.

When MySpace users go to their mailbox, they'll be invited to install Google Gears, said Allen Hurff, MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, in an appearance here Wednesday at the Google I/O conference. "It's available to everyone today," Hurff said.

Allen Hurff, MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, speaks at Google I/O.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

When users install Gears, they'll be able to quickly search their in-boxes for specific terms or sort messages, for example to show unread mail, Hurff said.

Gears, an open-source plug-in, endows browsers with a number of useful features to make them a better foundation for running elaborate software. Gears hasn't caught on widely, but MySpace gives the project more clout. And Google thinks some of Gears' success is actually measured in its influence over the new HTML 5 standard for describing Web pages.

In MySpace's case, one useful Gears feature is local storage on a computer. Another is the ability to run multiple threads at the same time--in effect, to walk and chew gum at the same time. For MySpace, that includes letting a computer index text at the same time it draws user-interface elements on the browser screen, Hurff said.

On Wednesday, Google announced it's changing the project's name from Google Gears to just Gears.

"We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing," said Chris Prince, a Google software engineer, in a blog posting. "We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the Web platform."

Google also announced that it's expanding browser support for Gears.

"We are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile," Prince said.

I finally got access to Google Docs offline, the launch of which I covered yesterday. I understand why Google is pitching it as a safety net for a flaky online connection, as opposed to an honest-to-goodness offline application. As we noted yesterday, you cannot yet create a new document when offline. And something we weren't told: when working offline, you can't insert a picture into a file nor review its revision history.

Furthermore, offline edit reconciliation isn't quite what I was told it would be. I fired up a shared Docs file, pulled the Ethernet plug on my machine, and started to make changes. Meanwhile, I asked Josh, still online, to edit the same block of text I was working on. When I plugged my machine back into the Net, Josh's changes overwrote mine with no warning. The revision history kept a record of all edits, but unlike the real-time collaborative editing that occurs when all parties are online, Josh did not have a chance to see the changes I was making; his text just took precedence.

You cannot control the online/offline state of Google Docs, as you can in Google's RSS reader. That's not a major loss, since there's no advantage to working offline. The offline site is no faster than the online site, for example.

Don't get me wrong: offline access to Google Docs is a necessary addition to the app, and I am sure it will improve over time. Google's Ken Norton was clear that document creation is coming to the offline version of Docs. But at the moment it's really just a nice insurance policy if you work on a wonky connection, or if you want to edit--but not create--documents when you're in an offline environment like an airplane.

Cues that Google is working offline: one, the connection icon in the upper-right is grey, not green; and two, it tells you.

Google Docs' word processor is finally getting offline access. Using the free Google Gears extension, users will soon be able to read and edit their files even when they have no Internet connection.

The Gears-enabled version of Google Docs will roll out to users over the next few weeks, starting Monday. If you don't have access to the feature, just keep trying, Google Docs product manager Ken Norton told me. You'll know you have the feature when you see a little "offline" menu item in the upper right of your document window in Google Docs.

Offline access for Google's spreadsheet and presentation app will follow after the word processor rollout is complete, Norton said, and will be read-only to start.

Google Docs will not, at first, let users create new documents while offline. The feature's first-use case is, "I'm amending a document and I lose my Internet connection," Norton said. Document creation capability will come eventually.

Of course, users will not be able to collaborate in real time when offline, or see if other users are simultaneously modifying a document they are editing in offline mode. Google Docs will "do its best" to reconcile changes made by multiple users when one or more are offline, Norton said. If there are conflicting edits, a dialog box will pop up when an offline editor comes back online.

Offline access is a necessary feature to make Google's productivity suite a competitor to Microsoft Office. However Google Docs' feature set, while improving over time, still falls far short of the functionality available in the Microsoft suite.

The only other Google application to use Google Gears currently is the RSS reader, Google Reader. A few other apps use Google Gears, such as Remember The Milk.

Mozilla maintains that HTML 5, which includes specifications for offline access to interactive Web sites, will obviate the need for Google Gears. That's not likely to stop people from trying the new offline version of Docs. Norton reminded me that Gears is open source, and that it is "the only way to bring offline support to the entire Web audience as a whole."

Gears does indeed run on more platforms than HTML 5 today, however it still doesn't cover every Web platform: Google Gears runs on Firefox 1.6 and above (but not beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher on Windows. There is no support for Safari, Flock, Opera, Maxthon, or mobile browsers.

We'll have a hands-on review shortly.

Here's a demo by Google's Ken Norton: