An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you’ll be able to use your web apps – like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc – in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google’s hands.
Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it’s a very cozy relationship. We’ve discussed before how Firefox 3 as information broker suits Google very nicely, because the Mountain View company has a number of best of breed web apps – and if it’s not building them, it’s acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).
Rod Drury also pointed out in his post how this makes Firefox attractive as the browser platform of choice for SaaS providers (Software as a Service). For example salesforce.com.
I don’t even need to say which bigco all of this strikes at the most (cough, Microsoft!). With both Google and (maybe) the big SaaS companies buddying up with Mozilla, it makes it even more compelling to run office apps online in the Firefox browser. So it is potentially a double whammy blow to Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.
Incidentally, early this week we’ll be exploring another exciting offline web apps technology. One gets the feeling that offline capabilities is the next big frontier for web apps – and it’s especially important for Google in their battle with Microsoft.
p.s. since the stormtrooper on toilet pic was popular, here’s another great (kind of relevant) stormtrooper pic I found on Flickr:
A stormtrooper holding a ‘Flickr is offline’ card – from 1978seymour
UPDATE: Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla responds in the comments (#10): “Yes, Web apps need to be reengineered for this, and no, no-one (including Google) has announced they will do so — although we hope they will! […]”
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)