Google Docs Tests Offline Support, Powered by HTML5

Google Docs team promised to bring back offline support this summer, but some traces of the new offline interface are already available. "I logged into Docs today and saw this! It's not yet functional, but an exciting sign! The code is being pushed," says Owen, a reader of this blog.


Angelo "saw a black bar flash up on screen quickly when loading the DocList of [his] Google Apps account". After a few refreshes, he managed to see the bar that lets you switch to the offline mode. Unfortunately, Google Docs doesn't work offline, at least not yet.

In a recent Reddit thread, a member of the Google Docs team said that "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."

{ Thanks, Owen and Angelo. }