Google announced a new plugin called Google Gears that allows web applications to provide functionality even when users are offline.  Right now, the only application that is using the new plugin is my beloved Google Reader, so I downloaded the plugin and decided to try it out.

Most of you who know me well are well-aware of what a Google whore I am, so this is hard for me to say– Google Gears sucks, and it sucks hard.

So there I am, flying through my feeds at my usual clip, when a pop-up informs me that I’m no longer connected to the Internet and asks if I would like to work in the offline mode.  I switch over to a different tab, type in www.yahoo.com, and it comes up immediately, so I’m thinking that Google Gears is mistaken.  I switch back to the Reader tab, close the pop-up, and I continue reading without a hitch.

And then the pop-up happens again.  And again.  And again.  And so I disabled Google Gears, and I’m iffy on ever re-enabling it.  I dig the idea of being able to read my feeds offline, but not at the expense of my user experience when I’m reading them online.  Notifying the user that the app thinks your offline is the sort of thing that should be handled by a status icon in the upper right hand corner right up until the point that the app can no longer satisfy the user’s request– the way that true desktop apps like Outlook handle it.

Blergh.  Very disappointing.

Labels: tech, web2.0

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