Google Docs to Support Offline Mode

Tweet

Google has already established dominance in the market for cloud-based office suites, with Google Docs. But as it plans to add offline support for the service, will this mean they are directly challenging Office, LibreOffice and other office suites?

Offline support from Google Docs has often been an iffy proposition. It’s a sometimes-on, sometimes-off thing, with Google supporting various means of using Docs offline. This has included Google Gears (which has since been disabled) and even synchronization with Microsoft Office through Google Cloud Connect. Microsoft has even put up a challenge, with its own Office 365 cloud document management suite. But with Google planning to make Docs run locally without an Internet connection, should Microsoft be worried?

Google is reportedly working on making Docs run offline, with a bit of HTML5 and other tweaks, so that you can use the service even without an active Internet connection. This might be useful when you have a Chromebook and you’re stuck without a working data or Wi-Fi connection. Google informally confirms this, as a Google Docs team member wrote:

[Y]ou’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.

This is pretty exciting to folks interested in a free and easy-to use Office suite that you can use from just about anywhere. Now the question is when this will happen, and how Google plans to actually implement it.