Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Gmail: the offline fate of Labs

The offline mode of Gmail is no longer experimental and is part of the webmail features.

After nearly a year spent in Gmail Labs, the offline earned his stripes as a full functionality offered to users of webmail. In the settings of Gmail, a link connection has not appeared. This particular feature practice the move with the vagaries of an Internet connection, you can synchronize e-mails so you can access offline.

It leverages the Gears plugin (to install) to download a local cache in the e-mails. Until the Internet connection is active, this cache is synchronized with the Gmail servers. If the connection is interrupted, Gmail automatically switches to offline and uses the data stored on the hard disk of the computer.

It is possible to read e-mails, to write from the perspective of a consignment which will take place at the next Internet connection. Throughout her pregnancy in the Labs, the offline has benefited from several improvements, the latest on the selection of messages to download for offline viewing, the possibility of attaching attachments.

HTML 5 will take over from Gears
With the scheduled arrival of the operating system OS Chrome netbook, the ability to work offline is important. The OS is indeed oriented Web applications are Web applications that should always be able to use despite a loss of Internet connection. However, Gears is not the leading technology in the field, yielding his place to HTML 5.

Google has announced the discontinuation of development of Gears, now preferring to focus on the HTML 5 standard which incorporates the same opportunities to work offline without the need to install a plugin for the user.

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