Gadgetsteria » offline email http://gadgetsteria.com All Things Gadget Fri, 25 May 2012 12:41:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Offline Gmail a no go for Mac users. Google Gears to blame… http://gadgetsteria.com/2009/12/08/offline-gmail-a-no-go-for-mac-users/ http://gadgetsteria.com/2009/12/08/offline-gmail-a-no-go-for-mac-users/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:19:19 +0000 Mike Norris http://gadgetsteria.com/?p=18892 gmail-logoGoogle fanatics and Mac power users are experience a bad case of digital doldrums tonight. While starting the week off on a high with Gmail Offline support officially rolling out to everyone — and not relegated to a simple, option lab feature — many will be ending on a completely different plane. You see, in order for Gmail’s offline features to work, your browser needs to support Google Gears. Macs don’t do support Google Gears, but only through Firefox. Safari support is hit and miss. And Google Chrome is moving to HTML 5… But all is not lost — in the impending future anyway.

Google themselves came forward recently and announced that they were abandoning Gears and instead putting the majority of their developing muscle behind HTML5. The biggest benefit of course being widespread and non-proprietary support as well as a close feature set to Gears with untapped potential for future innovations.

I could tell you happy tales of HTML 5 and open source development all day. But it won’t mask the cold hard reality that settles in when the glitz and glamor of “HTML 5″ wear off. The reality being that for the hear and now, Mac users are left in the dark when it comes to offline Gmail support. As of writing there isn’t a solution for Chrome/Gears use on Macs. But give it some time. I’m sure some crafty developer can whip something mighty tasty up. Though I’m sure you would just as easily be pleased if Google hopped to it and whipped up some offline Gmail support via HTML 5.

Of course there is that one small problem of HTML 5 not actually being a standard yet….

Cnet

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