Wednesday, May 30, 2007

At the San Jose Convention Center on Thursday, as Google Developer Day 2007 gets underway in the U.S., Google engineering VP Jeff Huber plans to demonstrate how one of his company's online applications, Google Reader, can be used without an Internet connection.

"Ajax-based applications, browser-based applications, are great and have many, many wonderful properties," said Huber. "But we found that every so often, people get on airplanes."

Google's recently disclosed purchase of browser security startup GreenBorder suddenly makes a lot more sense: Google is moving into Microsoft territory, the desktop.

"With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in a statement. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone."

Google hopes Gears will become the standard for adding offline capabilities -- data storage, application caching, and multi-threading -- to online applications.

Labels: Google, Internet