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! […]”
