For many, the GAPE-ing hole in Google Apps is that they don’t work offline.
Josh Bernoff considers this point so good he makes it twice. He concludes by asking: “is there a huge offline browsing/apps breakthrough in the offing?”
Richard, the alert kiwi, provided an answer to this question a week or two ago.
Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla… 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.