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• Wow! This was something I was anticipating since long.. I belong to a Computer Engg Background and have been preferring web applications over desktop solutions for most of the application solutions.. The only drawback was that such applications came to halt without a n/w available..

  Countries like India where internet access is still in infancy, such a concept will be like a revolution..

  I am looking forward to a stable preview release of FF3.. Kudos to the Mozilla foundation!

  Posted by: Prateek Sharma | February 11, 2007 11:56 PM




• I am not sure how the browser will make a difference, Both Zoho and Editgrid - run on spreadsheet software on the server and then just pass data to the client to be displayed and it is presumed that google spreadsheets do the same thing.

  So I am not sure what can be done with the browser that will stop these client side applications needing to talk to the server to update the spreadsheet calculations. So no matter how powerful the browser is - I cant see how without major modifications many online applications will run offline.

  Posted by: Stephen | February 12, 2007 12:03 AM




• I don't get this. The services you've described would need to be re-engineered for the offline world. How does that play into Google's hands when it's model is based on dynamic adserving and where GAYD is an as yet unproven subscription model?

  Posted by: Dennis Howlett | February 12, 2007 12:21 AM




• We assume that there must be good reasons to reference Stormtrooper on a browser related post.

  In our Feb 28 Browser Wars, we will be watching our internet version of Star Wars. This one is real.

  Would any one will ask about offline browser support?

  Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones
  VS
  Browser Wars: Episode II Attack of the DOMs

  What: Browser Wars: Episode II Attack of the DOMs
  When: Feb 28, 2007 Wed 6:00pm
  Where: Yahoo Building C, 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale , California 94089
  Who: Douglas Crockford, Architect at Yahoo & Founder of JSON (Moderator & Host)
  Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform at Microsoft
  Mike Shaver, Director of Ecosystem Development at Mozilla Corporation
  Håkon Wium Lie, CTO at Opera & Founder of CSS
  Lou Gervais, Founder of Silicon Valley Webguild & Technical Development SIG (MC)

  Required Registration: http://browserwarii.eventbrite.com

  Posted by: SVWB | February 12, 2007 1:19 AM




• Applications like spreadsheets I suspect do a combination of client side calculations as well as server side. Offline usage wouldn't provide full functionality. Some possibilities might be:

  * view only for analysis
  * data entry, with synch on the server when connected
  * simple spreadsheets with formula that don't require the server

  Another offline usage scenario is for protection of data if the connection is lost. While entering data in the spreadsheet, the connection is lost, you can continue without losing your data. When connected it synchronises.

  Posted by: Chris Double | February 12, 2007 1:19 AM




• Thanks for making my day by bringing this news to me!

  This will be great for web apps whose users, at some point, would want to be able to work offline as well (e.g. I like working on the plane) and one would have to make a cross-platform desktop client to allow for this which would be a lot of work for a small web start-up. I guess I am not the only one who has been pondering this issue.

  Re the other comments, I guess they'll have to extend Javascript in some way, or offer another framework to easily cache data/requests on disk in offline mode and decide what happens to that data once you're back online, but, provided that they keep it reasonably simple, that's definitely much easier for most web apps than to offer a fully fledged desktop alternative.

  Obviously, in most cases, you cannot offer the full functionality in offline mode, but still I can see a lot of possible uses.

  Two thoughts:
  1. Implications regarding security?
  2. A lot of people, including me, hope for better integration/synchronization options between Google apps and OpenOffice.org. Looks like the possibility to run Google applications offline in FF would take away momentum from that idea.

  (BTW, just to let you know: this textarea is too large in my browser (FF (FF 2.0.0.1 on Ubuntu Dapper, 1600x1200) - half of it hidden behind the sidebar).

  Posted by: Christian Flury | February 12, 2007 1:22 AM




• >(BTW, just to let you know: this textarea is too large in my browser (FF (FF 2.0.0.1 on Ubuntu Dapper, 1600x1200) - half of it hidden behind the sidebar).

  My fault (sort of): I had increased the font-size (Ctrl++).

  Posted by: Christian Flury | February 12, 2007 1:28 AM




• SitePen has developed an offline toolkit which can provide a similiar experience for any browser.

  http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2007/01/09/28/

  Posted by: SavvyGuy | February 12, 2007 1:30 AM




• I don't get it either, how can it be. As Dennis says, applications should be re-engineered for this, no? But great news, hope to see it live as soon as possible!

  Posted by: Emre Sokullu | February 12, 2007 1:32 AM




• Yes, Web apps need to be reengineered for this, and no, no-one (including Google) has announced they will do so --- although we hope they will! Our offline app support builds on a few APIs that are already at least quasi-standards --- WHATWG client-side storage, jar: URLs, and WHATWG online/offline sensing. The only really new API is an API for storing application pages in the "offline cache", and that's just a new "rel" keyword for the element. So it should be pretty easy to add this to any browser.

  Implications regarding security: there aren't any really. Applications remain sandboxed using the same domain security model as when they're online.

  Ads can be downloaded, stored, and served out of the cache. However, I think people are going to be online most of the time, so supporting offline mode won't cost the vendor much ad revenue; instead it will just remove an adoption barrier for the vendor's applications.

  SavvyGuy: the Dojo offline toolkit is cool, but it requires the user to download the toolkit --- and trust it. A purely browser-based approach avoids that.

  Posted by: Robert O'Callahan | February 12, 2007 1:45 AM




• Chris #5 - the only spreadsheet at the moment that does any client side calculations as far as I can tell is numsum - all the other spreadsheets (editgrid, zohosheet and google) have failed to do even the simplest of sums (=2+3) when in offline mode (network cable pulled out) and bring up a dialog box telling users that they must reload or use a view only version. This tells me that all the calculations that they are doing is being returned to a central server or servers to be calculated.

  Many of these same spreadsheets will not let you enter data at all when in offline mode and enforce a view only mode; Google in fact appears to require to go to the server to decide if the number is entered is a number or a character. This can be seen with the slow data entry and the fact that update is required before it will right justify a number.

  I am all for offline applications and think that ironically enough that online applications that work offline will be the way of the future.

  Posted by: Stephen | February 12, 2007 4:55 AM




• 
  The interesting bit, and I think Firefox2's DOM storage already enables those scenarios, just that apparently none of the web apps take advantage of it right now, is that :
  - Microsoft makes a push to compete, comes with similar stuff in IE. But doing so, they canibalize themselves, for instance Word, Excel, email, calendar, contacts : all of that would not require a MS Office license anymore
  - Microsoft stays away. They are canibalized by everybody else. Windows and MS Office made irrelevant in most scenarios.

  Posted by: Stephane Rodriguez | February 12, 2007 6:41 AM




• If it'll be only for FF then it'll suck. Again Opera, Konqueror, Safari etc. are worst? FF is going to be another monopoly that way.

  Posted by: cenebris | February 12, 2007 8:33 AM




• It's interesting to see the different approaches being taken to allow offline web apps. In addition to Firefox 3 and Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT), two other options are Adobe Apollo and Web2os.

  Apollo is a html/javascript/flash runtime allowing web desktop apps that run outside the usual browser and with local file access.

  Web2os is a different take on the Dojo Offline Toolkit proxy, whereby the proxy has local sql storage and runs its own javascript sandboxed environment.

  The Google office apps are a good test case for each approach – e.g. how much re-engineering is needed to support offline use? do you need to download all your gmail, calendar entries before going offline? can you still search when offline? etc.

  The Web2os approach segments the client javascript with pseudo server javascript in the proxy that talks the same api. This can silently cache api calls and data when online but respond dynamically to the same api calls when offline.

  There are pros and cons to each approach - one big win for Firefox 3 is that no other trusted download will be required.

  Posted by: Rhys Jones | February 12, 2007 9:36 AM




• mentioning google apps right off the bat seems more than just a little premature. who knows which apps get support, how long we have to wait for support, and whether the offline system uses firefox's implementation or something more akin to just dojo.storage solution itself. its nice to think google would hop to and implement wonderful support right away, but remember that in the move to offline you're really pushing the optimism in optimistic concurrency: any changes to the online document and your offline copy is suddenly insolvent. i dont think google would settle for that, -- not with the point of google spreadsheets being multiple editors -- so theres plenty of implementation issues left.

  Posted by: rektide | February 12, 2007 10:09 AM




• Ok, this is really interesting. It also goes hand in hand with Mozilla's concept to become an information broker and not just a browser.

  Posted by: Devon Young | February 12, 2007 12:06 PM




• There are other alternatives as well which are not just Firefox only.
  http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javadb/overview/product_tour/index.jsp
  and this is what Zimbra did to enable their collaborative web apps to run offline:
  http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2006/11/taking_zimbra_offline.html

  There isn't just one browser in this world and nothing is magic when it comes to empower today's web 2.0 online web applications to be run offline...

  Posted by: Francois Orsini | February 12, 2007 1:55 PM




• From comment #13:

  > If it'll be only for FF then it'll suck. Again Opera, Konqueror, Safari etc. are worst? FF is going to be another monopoly that way.

  See comment #10.

  Posted by: raiph | February 12, 2007 4:58 PM




• Oh, the pain! To test this they'll need connect and disconnect so many times...

  Posted by: who cares | February 14, 2007 1:54 PM




• Just a note to re-iterate that nothing we do for offline web apps in Firefox 3 will be "proprietary" -- it's all based on standards that either are or will be implemented by other browsers. As Robert O'Callahan points out in his blog, it's also a small delta to the existing client tier, which builds on browser security and programming models. Who needs a new client-host-based tier, with all the security and programming model questions it raises, which comes at the price of another sizable download?

  If you need to work cross-browser and deal with IE, then Dojo Offline Toolkit looks to me like the smallest download and the shortest path. And we are working with Brad to make sure that Firefox 3 and DOT work together as much as possible, so that web apps that support offline operation in Firefox 3 relieve the need for DOT, and also work in other browsers when DOT is installed.

  Some commenters have asserted that WHAT-WG storage or the cross-browser dojo.storage library are enough to do offline web apps, but that's not the case (hence Brad's work on DOT -- he did dojo.storage too). The cache miss problem is not solved simply by more generous client-side storage than cookies. Storage is part of the solution, but not all of it.

  Apollo is a replacement tier for the browser, but in spite of smart re-use and blending of Flash and HTML (and PDF? Why?), you have to download it and buy into its proprietary APIs and compound document integration -- and teach it about your saved passwords and other settings. Good luck to it; my money is on browsers.

  /be

  Posted by: Brendan Eich | February 16, 2007 11:20 AM




• The strength of caching isn't about being offline, it's about lowering bandwidth. Any page, even webapps, are limited to loading in a reasonable period of a few second or users won't be interested. But if Fx caches the webapp (eg, email client) and only downloads the changing data (eg, an email) then a webapp can become any size, a megabyte or 100s of megabytes. This bodes well for webapps to become more feature-full and powerful, their greatest drawback now.

  For example, Google Maps and Google Earth take the same basic concept, streaming geo data from a server to your computer. GEarth can't exist in a browser because it would take too long to download every session.

  The next step would be for Fx to create a new AJAX-esque scripting language to take advantage of these bigger webapps, like when IE created the DOM.

  But don't worry! Because Fx is open source, any other browser is welcome to mimic (without copying) their code. Open source makes monopolies impossible.

  Posted by: Ephilei | February 24, 2007 1:39 PM