As explained on Google's FAQ:

"Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server;
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser;
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background."

That is important. The biggest single hurdle to mass adoption of web-based office software is the inability to use it when online access is not possible (in airplanes and other fun places off the grid). Offline access is also reassuring for those times when the cloud platform is having trouble: at least you can work offline for a while. This is not a small feature. It is the big one.

We get the usual beta warnings from Google:

"Gears is currently a beta product; moreover, it is currently considered to be a developer-only release. When the developer community has had a chance to examine, critique, and improve Gears, a final version suitable for use with production applications will be made available."

But we learn to ignore these beta designations from Google. Gmail still says beta.

But in this case, Google really is being shy about fully bringing Gears to its own product line-up.

Zoho Is Using Gears. Why Not Google Apps?

Zoho started using Gears in Writer as early as August 2007, nearly 18 months ago. In October 2008, Zoho Mail went offline with Gears.

On March 31st, 2008, Google announced Gears for Docs. This was a step forward, albeit 8 months after its competition (Zoho) did it.

So, the big question is, "When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?" I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.

Ahem, What About Chrome?

Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.

Editor's update: we obviously got the above section totally wrong, so it's been struck out. Apologies for that error, but thanks to our commenters for quickly pointing it out!

"Gears for Mobile Is the Holy Grail"

I had a fascinating talk with Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering) and Sumit Agarwal (Mobile Product Management). They laid out a mobile strategy that clearly shows that Google is thinking bigger and deeper than anyone else about the future of this huge market. They were also frank about the scale of the engineering challenge. Looking globally, there is no dominant mobile device. In fact, it is an extremely fragmented market. That is a problem when each user expects a native interface.

Vic Gundotra described how about a year ago Google bet that the mobile browser would be the unifying force. Specifically, the strategy was to standardize on Webkit-based browsers. That makes sense but still leaves out the all-important offline access question. So, I posed the "What about Gears?" question. I was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the "holy grail."

The Answer Given Is Probably Correct

Google is confirming that Gears is critically important to both its web apps and its mobile strategy, and that the delay is simply because deploying Gears on the scale that Google operates is a tough engineering challenge. That seems like the best explanation. But we would love to hear from our readers. Have you used Zoho Mail with Gears, and did it work well? Is it simply a scale issue that is delaying Google's more aggressive deployment of Gears?

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes.

Here is the video, also available on Google Code blog:

Some of Google's competitors such as Zimbra or Zoho are already offering some of these capabilities based on Google Gears. MySpace, too, is working on making its messaging platform available offline using Gears.

As Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog observes, Google's support for SyncML is also noteworthy. SyncML is an open standard for synchronizing information between different devices and, so far, has mostly been adopted by the mobile phone industry, with all the major companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, as well as IBM and Siemens supporting it in at least some of their products.

The latest version of SyncML has added support for push email. According to Andrew Fogg, Google is using SyncML for synchronizing its contacts database with the iPhone, but in the long run, it is probably worth speculating if Google might also start pushing email to the iPhone (or any other phone for that matter), using the SyncML push technology.

MySpace is using Gears to allow users to store their message archive on their computer and search it in real-time. The company will be "proactively prompting" power users with over 5,000 stored messages to opt-in to the Gears mail system, and clearly hopes that by moving mail search queries offline, it will lower the site's computing requirements. "Operating at a scale with four to six million concurrent users a day, we are saving significant and expensive server-side resources by creating this feature utilizing Gear," said Allen Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace in a press release.

The Year in Gears

Gears was launched in May 2007 at Google's developer conference. Google Reader was the first in house implementation of the technology, which lets web applications go offline by syncing data to a local database. Australia-based to-do list app Remember the Milk was one of the first third-party apps to embrace Gears, and in November, Zoho Writer went offline on Gears, beating Google's own Docs app, which wouldn't go offline until two months ago (Documents is read/write, but Spreadsheets and Presentations are currently just read-only).

Last month, we questioned whether offline access is even necessary. After all, wrote Sarah Perez, "in today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection." We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day.

Later, we noted that there's a difference between offline and desktop access, the latter being an important step in the evolution of web applications and the path toward mass adoption. Desktop access, such as provided by "competing" offline APIs Prism from Mozilla and AIR from Adobe, is different than Google's "keep it in the browser" approach to bridging the desktop and online worlds.

I asked Google about AIR and Prism, and Director of Engineering Linus Upson told me that they look at Prism and AIR as single site browsers -- web browsers restricted to a single web application. "We'd love to see Gears support in both of them," said Upson. Because Gears is a browser extension, Upson told me it could theoretically be used to extend AIR or Prism and allow developers the ability to give their apps access to new web standards that AIR and Mozilla don't yet support.

Future Pushing Open Standards

The Gears project was started internally because developers at Google were fed up with how slow browsers adopt new and exciting web standards. Browsers are generally hesitant to implement new technologies, and Google looked at Gears as a way to get access to those standards without having to wait for the browser world to catch up.

In a recent post on the Google Code blog, Gears Engineer Aaron Boodman wrote about how going forward, Gears will strive to implement web standards defined for HTML5 into Gears, giving developers access to those features while browser vendors are still playing catch up. "Gears aims to bring emerging web standards to as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible," he wrote.

Upson told me that Google wants to see standards available in all browsers, and offering bits of HTML5 standards via Gears, which is a cross-browser extension, is the fastest way they could think to do it. It is Upson's hope that Gears will actually help speed the adoption of web standards.

"By implementing emerging web standards, Gears is influencing what the web of tomorrow will look and act like," Boodman wrote. Upson and VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai echoed that sentiment and told me that Google is deeply involved in helping to shape the development of future web standards at the W3C.

• It will actually help make web apps more popular.
• Running a ton of apps in the browser at once is a pain.

The Desktop is the Key to Making Web Apps Mainstream

As I commented in Sarah's post yesterday, for those of us who read blogs like ReadWriteWeb, using web apps has become second nature. Putting data in the cloud makes sense, and the thought of being offline for more than 10 minutes per day seems ludicrous. But I suspect that's not the case for everyone.

For many mainstream users, I think the idea of storing your data in the cloud is kind of creepy (that's the word my girlfriend used the other day when I was explaining to her how things like Google Docs work). Giving those people access to the software in the traditional form of a desktop application will, in my opinion, help push them gently toward web applications. Get them hooked on Google Docs on the desktop, convince them of the convenience of having anywhere access to the app on the web, and then you might start seeing people really embrace web apps as they get more comfortable with the idea.

The conversation I had with my girlfriend went something like this (paraphrasing heavily here):

Her: "So where are my documents stored?"
Me: "On Google's servers."
Her: "And I don't actually own the software?"
Me: "No, you just sort of rent it."
Her: "So if Google goes down, or decides to stop making Docs, they take my software and documents with it?"
Me: "Theoretically that could happen, yeah."
Her: "And if there's a security breach my documents are there for the taking?"
Me: "Technically, yes."
Her: "That's kinda creepy.... I don't think I like that."

I think that's a fairly standard view among mainstream software users. So, desktop access becomes important as a means to an end. Web apps will have a much smoother road to mass mainstream adoption if offline/desktop versions are used as a bridge.

The Browser is No Place for Multitasking

Looking at my Windows taskbar right now, I have copies of Thunderbird, Trillian, Photoshop, FeedDemon, Notepad, Word, Winamp, and Twhirl running. Sure, I could run web app equivalents of each of those in the browser -- GMail, Meebo, Aviary Phoenix, Google Reader, Docs, Pandora, and a Twitter module in Netvibes might suffice. But they'd all be running in Firefox at once (oh, Firefox is also running on my system right now).

Managing those apps from the desktop is pretty simple. Managing them all at once in Firefox would be a nightmare, and would likely start to make Firefox unstable and act naughty. That's precisely the reason FreshBooks launched a desktop app today using Mozilla Prism. "One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave," wrote Freshbooks developer Rich Lafferty.

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, "Adobe AIR isn't just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages - not hosting applications."

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn't arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Conclusion

There is a third reason desktop/offline access is important: web access isn't yet ubiquitous. There are plenty of times when connecting to the Internet just isn't happening, and having access to your data and your software on the desktop is definitely beneficial during those times. But, as Sarah wrote yesterday, no access is becoming more the exception than the rule. Every day offline access is becoming less and less important for applications, but desktop access is still necessary.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

In the short term, products like Google Gears, a browser plug-in that takes web apps offline, are a necessary evil, bridging the gap between desktop and web -nothing more than a transitional piece in the desktop to cloud computing move.

The offline component of Docs is clearly designed to make the move from desktop suites to web apps more comfortable and less off-putting for those accustomed to the stable, always available nature of their trusty desktop programs.

However, by focusing on an offline web, one has to wonder if this is really progress: if we wanted an offline word processor, well...don't we already have several of those available already? Shouldn't a product like Google Docs be more focused on what makes them unique in the office suite space instead?

Besides, going offline isn't easy - which is why you don't see many other web 2.0 developers taking their web-based startup to the desktop world. Additionally, offline apps aren't nearly as good as their online selves: As Harry McCracken wrote on a Sunday night blog post on PC World, "No current Gears-enabled app is anything like its full-blooded self in offline form--and since most of them are stripped-down compared to traditional desktop software even in their online versions, that means the offline ones are barebones at best."

It's true. When you go offline with Google Docs, you're missing out on one of the features that makes their suite worthwhile - real-time collaboration.

For obvious reasons, SaaS apps, like Google Docs, have trouble in a disconnected world. And while this problem might be a deal-breaker for some people now, it won't always be the case. Before too long, being offline will be the exception - even airplanes have started offering internet access - not the rule. And who knows what Verizon's spectrum win will bring a few years down the road?

So, yes, offline access is important now, but not as important as a few years ago, and certainly less important with each passing day.

Hopefully, companies like Google and Adobe and others focusing on providing offline tools, won't get too sidetracked in their need to compete with the desktop world since they would only be perfecting what will soon become an infrequently used feature.

Instead, the focus for these tools should be on the features that only an internet-connected program can offer, things like real-time collaboration or Docs' GoogleLookUp feature. These will be the driving forces to prompt mainstream use of online suites, not the fact that they work sans internet.

Maybe Google Gears isn't backward progress exactly, at least not today, but it's important for these web companies to keep their priorities straight: offer users amazing features they can't get in an offline program, then worry about fighting for desktop space.

As we wrote in February, offline access was the one missing component to make Google's web office a serious competitor to Microsoft Office. Computing in the cloud is great because it means access to your information from anywhere, and on any machine, but it also means reliance on a high-speed Internet connection. Offline access removes that drawback and lets web applications behave even more like their desktop counterparts. Our only question is: what has taken Google so long?

They released Gears in May of last year, and so far the only service of theirs to use it has been Reader. Competitor Zoho launched an offline version of its word processing application using Gears last November, and we've long pointed out offline access as a major competitive advantage for Zimbra.

So what has been taking Google so long? Why isn't it eating its own dogfood and releasing more of its web apps with Gears support? What about Gmail? These are some important questions. The longer Google waits, the more time its competitors have to push out offline versions of their web applications and the longer Microsoft has to finally come up with a web app strategy that makes sense.

Below is a video of Google Docs offline created by Google. As you can see, the offine features function more or less the way they do in Reader.

Securing Nokia’s support marks a major coup for Microsoft. Having already committed to developing a version of Silverlight for all three major desktop Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OS and Linux), gaining access to Nokia’s millions of mobile users brings Microsoft one step closer to fulfilling the promise of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework with genuine ‘write once, run anywhere’ capabilities — the holy grail of software development.

However, notes last100 editor Steve O'Hear, while scoring a partnership with Nokia is a huge win for Microsoft, it hardly means that Silverlight will be the de facto mobile RIA platform. RIM, Apple, Adobe, and Google each have their own platforms for mobile RIA development.

For the full scoop, check out the post at last100 and be sure to subscribe to last100's RSS feed to keep up on all the latest digital lifestyle news.