One of the biggest problems with switching your life to Google’s suite of applications is that, the moment you go offline, you lose access to email, calendars, docs and your RSS feeds.  The folks over at Mozilla who have been working feverishly on the new Firefox 3 also will be working with the Google team to provide support for Google’s applications when offline. Similar to Google Gears which offers support for Google application via a browser plugin, Google applications will be built into the new browser itself. Firefox 3 will be the first browser to offer this built in feature.

I suppose that if you really do switch everything over to the Google suite of apps then this might be really handy. Personally, I have little interest in editing a document via the web when I have perfectly good editors installed locally. I suppose though, that this is the direction we’re all heading… data in the cloud so to speak. I question though, how valuable this stuff really is in the long term? Aren’t we all online most of the time anyway? Won’t WiMax and the coming technologies provide an “always on” atmosphere that renders this pointless? Google gears uses HTML, JavaScript, etc… web technologies… to do it’s thing. I’ve worked on technical docs that are several hundred megs. I have a hard time buying that I’ll be able to work on a document of that size with web technologies and that it will be responsive, or offer all the more complex features offered in some word processors. If anybody could do it, it’s the folks at Google who continue to exceed our expectations. Only time will tell.