Google Starts to Make Online Apps Work Offline

Use enough Web applications, and you'll grow very familiar with one common complaint: Anytime you're offline, you can't get to your data. But a growing number of applications are working to change that.

Zimbra, a popular open-source e-mail application, added an offline version called Zimbra Desktop back in March. Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 will support caching to allow Web apps to work offline. And Adobe's desktop Ajax application framework called AIR will offer some support for offline data. But, as it often does, Google has made the biggest splash so far with the Gears API it announced in May.

Google released Gears along with the first app to make use of it, a new version of Google Reader that allows for offline reading of RSS feeds. Other companies have begun to use the Gears framework, too; the first one I found to have implemented it is the online to-do list tracker Remember the Milk.