Today’s buzz in the Web 2.0 world is offline access to web applications. Zimbra, an online office suite, has announced Zimbra Desktop, which will enable the users access to Zimbra even when they’re not online. Richard over at Read/Write Web notices that this is becoming a growing trend, with other companies like Mozilla (Firefox 3 will have offline browsing capabilities), Morfik and Google going the offline-to-online route, too. Zimbra Desktop Alpha is already available for download.
While I don’t see anything wrong with being able to access online applications even if not connected to the web, I don’t see it as a killer feature. Although some parts of the world (well, geographically, most of it) is still offline or even barely online, the direction we’re heading is definitely an always-online world. Furthermore, those of us who are used to the always-online style of living will probably refuse to do serious work in an offline environment. I’d rather spend my time searching for a net connection than even trying to work offline.
However, there’s more to it. Offline capabilities of online applications can actually help the overall usability of the online application. It’s not so much about being able to access your data when you’re on the train or a plane - although that’s nice, too - it’s about the application, as a whole, working better.
Here are a couple of examples of how offline capabilities can help online applications work better:
- storing data locally instead of remotely, which means better privacy/security
- uninterrupted work in case of power outages or network problems or even restarts
- increased reliability. Even if being offline is a very rare occurrence for some users, they still want to have the security of being able to access critical data at all times - offline or online. It’s bringing the online apps one step closer to desktop apps, and it counts.
So, while being able to access your favorite web application even when not connected to the internet is a nice feature, it’s going to be less and less important in the future, since we’re all going towards an always-online world. But, the offline capabilities of online applications might bring other significant benefits to their overall usability. While introducing offline capabilities will definitely not be an imperative for all online applications, some of them - especially ones dealing with larger amounts of user-created data, like office suites - will have to consider this, or risk falling behind their competitors.
For some more ideas about the benefits of offline access to online web apps, go here, and here.
> - storing data locally instead of remotely,
> which means better privacy/security
I consider online applications more secure than desktop ones. One of the big thing in online applications that the user doesn’t have to deal with data replication, virus protection, trojans, etc.
> - uninterrupted work in case of power outages
> or network problems or even restarts
I this is more complicated than just storing data locally. You have to download the whole business logic too, keep it up2date. The functionality needs to be limited, or it will be a desktop application which is connected to a database.
> - increased reliability. Even if being offline is a
> very rare occurrence for some users, they
> still want to have the security of being
> able to access critical data at all times -
> offline or online. It’s bringing the online
> apps one step closer to desktop apps, and it counts.
This is an interesting point. We are close to the point where you can always be online easily (wifi/wimax/3g), so maybe we are working on a problem which will be sorted out in a different way.
Desktop application benefits:
- full os hw access
- offline operation
Problems:
- installation keeping it up2date
- data must be replicated by the user
If we could provide the power of the desktop appilcations to the online ones, maybe it would be enough, but I am afraid that HTML/CSS/JS is not enough for that.
The interesting thing is that people are buying computers because of the Internet. People don’t want to be sysadmins, installing updates etc. They would be equally happy if they could do the same with a set top box which has a browser installed.
@teki321: HTML/CSS/JS aren’t enough to bring web apps close enough to desktop apps, but new platforms such as Adobe Apollo are.
As far as your specific comments go, if you already haven’t, you should check the links I’ve provided at the end of the article. There are some very specific examples of how this might work.
> As far as your specific comments go, if you already haven’t, you should
> check the links I’ve provided at the end of the article. There are some very specific
> examples of how this might work.
The SitePen post demonstrates exactly what I was talking about, the functionality will be reduced or it has to be a full desktop application. It is dealing only with the data synchronization, misses the whole business logic (GMail without search…).
> @teki321: HTML/CSS/JS aren’t enough to bring web apps close
> enough to desktop apps, but new platforms such as Adobe Apollo are.
Apollo, MS WPF/E, OpenLaszlo Webtop are nice things, but they are not offline storage tools, but they provide a unified development platform for the desktop and the web.
This is good for the developers, because they have to use only one technology to develop for two platforms, but what about the users ?
HTML/CSS/js is good because it is a sort of widely adopted standards, but this new technologies will require their own runtime environments, which have to be kept up2date, you need more than one maybe, because your one of your favorite application is using Apollo the other one is running only in Firefox 3 and the third one is running only on Windows. And