Wizard's Blog

One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook.  Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can't think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears - same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has "flaky connection mode", which acts like offline mode in that you're always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode.  I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook's Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they're slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven't been able to test it yet but I'm really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline^0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues - you can't send an offline message with attachments and you can't access the contact manager offline.  Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

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Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project - Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser - I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security.  Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won't slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down.  Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they've included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3's Awesomebar and IE8's Smartbar.  They've also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about.  Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8.  It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index - they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers.  So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them - I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I'll definitely check Chrome out when it's released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they're releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

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Image via WikipediaI've been using the late betas and release candidates of Firefox v3 for a few weeks now. I would naturally have started playing with it earlier (as I have a blind spot that says a higher version number is always better) but the inevitable lack of support for my extensions held me back.

Continue reading ‘Firefox v3’ »