Google Docs offline coming this summer

It looks like Google is ready to dip its toes into being a direct competitor with Microsoft and all the other office productivity suites available on the market. It’s been previously rumored that Google will be making Google Docs work offline. Its previous “offline modes” its previous methods have been pretty unreliable, and since Google got rid of Google Gears support, the feature has been taken away.

Well on a recent Reddit thread created by five members of the Google Docs team, one of them wrote:

“You’re going to see offline start to roll out later this summer. We used to have offline with Google Gears, but it became pretty clear that plugins weren’t the right approach. We’ve been reimplementing offline using HTML5 standards like AppCache, File API, and IndexDB.

We’re some of the first webapps that are really putting those standards to the test, so it’s taken a while to iron out the kinks.”

While it’s unclear how Google plans to distribute the offline version of Google Docs or how it’s going to work, but it’s going to be interesting to see what they can come up with. Stay tuned for more details.

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: docs, Google, summer