Google Disables Offline Gmail for Chrome

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If you’ve been using Gmail’s offline access feature, then you might need to adjust a bit, as Google disables the feature from its own Chrome browser.

One of the advantages of cloud applications is that you can access these from any internet-connected device. The inherent disadvantage is that you have to be online. Gmail’s offline functionality is useful for reading and composing emails while offline, but Google will be removing this functionality when version 12 of Chrome is released.

Google is killing off Google Gears support from Chrome, and along with it, offline access to Gmail–at least temporarily. Gears was one of Google’s early attempts to create an engine for accessing content while offline. But with the HTML5 spec now incorporating this, Google is gradually shifting to HTML5 for offline access to its services like Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs, along with other web apps.

Offline Gmail will still work with Google Gears on Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6, though, which are actually older versions of those respective browsers. Google promises to re-enable offline Gmail support by early summer, and this will be done via HTML5, which should be a more universally-accepted standard, especially when HTML5 is finalized.