Oh, and I would add that an application, whatever it is, that can work in offline mode should always propose an option to do so. Even if you design you application with an idea in mind, some people will always use it in a way you didn’t thought about.
(That’s funny, I was thinking that I have a lot of exemple about that, but can’t figure just one. I will try to find one when cafeine will have do its work)
I was kicking myself this morning for not making the actionscript 3.0 documentation “available offline,” because their site was down. That’s a good use for the offline features - reference material that doesn’t change often, and should always be handy, online or not.
I’m not sure what I’d do with a browser in offline mode, but it is still useful for e-mail (write your replies, they stay in the outbox until you are connected) feed readers calendars, especially for commuters.
Also, there are countries that are not America.
Well, if you have lots of cache the offline mode is great 
The times i needed to ‘look up something on the web’ without having an internet connection are numerous.
I use it occasionally to browse my internet history when not connected. “doh, what was that site??” It will just pull the html file and embedded pics straight out of the browser cache.
Offline mode is still useful for mobile users in areas without broadband saturation. The University I work at is still testing it’s VPN facilities; if a laptop user wants to work on their files remotely, it must be done in offline mode. The same is true for businesses that are far away from cities, such as industrial processing facilities or chemical plants. Fast internet just isn’t an option in middle Alabama. If you have your “My Documents” folder on a network share at your office while on site, you’re pretty screwed without an offline mode.
This is more of an OS then application level, but it’s important. With a tendancy towards centralization and ubiquitus internet access, it’s easy to forget about areas that only allow 5kbps connections. Downloading a 40mb training presentation over a VPN just isn’t an option on sub-dialup speeds. Offline files let work continue without internet.
Speaking strictly in relation to the browser, however… yeah, it’s pretty useless.
Hmm, and what about this:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_3_offline_apps.php
"Firefox 3 To Support Offline Apps"
People who spend a lot of time on jet flights still need offline tools.
I kinda hate using serious apps inside of the web browser too. Seeing an application inside of a browser makes me think it’s fragile and can crap out and lose my data any minute. It will be interesting to see what Apollo does …
Applications like Scribe (a href="http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php)"http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php)/a use the offline feature to provide functionality in the absence of connectivity.
Sorry for being repetitive! missed seeing Matt’s comment.
Also in line with the Dojo links provided up there, you might be interested in this: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/02/offline-zimbra-with-firefox.html
Which means that kit developers do indeed see a need for a way to manage offline working.
I think looking at the “work offline” menu item in the browser misses the point: I’ve never used it simply because I’m still not sure exactly what it does, and I’ve never bothered enough to find out.
But working offline is not the same as the “work offline” menu. Working offline is just as much the various ‘save’ and ‘download’ menus. In a truly online world, there is no discernible difference between local and network content.
Until my next-generation iPod can play a song equally well streaming it off a public wireless network as can it today can from local storage, and it can do that even on the subway or when hiking in the Himalayas, until then offline mode still matters. Not the menu, but the concept.
That day may eventually come, but it may not happen in my lifetime.
I don’t use offline mode very often, but when I do, it is nearly essential.
Quite often I find something useful on the internet that I would like to reference later. In general usage, I am connected on cable and just pull it up again. But there have been many times where I was at my parents house (no broadband available, and no wifi), on the road (looking up that map that we thought we didn’t need to print out), or just plain without internet that evening before my assignment is due (blame Roadrunner, bad storms, or my router dying) and I DEFINITELY want a browser to have complete and easy access to all of the cache that I KNOW it was keeping while I was browsing to that same information yesterday. It seems ludicrous to me to not allow access to that information (which is normally stored in some format/naming that is nowhere close to human readable if you just browser to your cache folder).
Even within the US, wifi, cell phone internet and broadband may be ubiquitous IN major urban areas, but cell phone modems/services are still not cheap nor available in all rural areas, broadband access is VERY geographically limited, and stealing your neighbors wifi is great IF you live in an areas where your neighbors are likely to even know what wifi is
So yeah, from a research standpoint (ie, finding what I know I found yesterday) working offline is still VERY valuable in a web browser. I wish that it worked more seemlessly - any time I browsed to a site that I couldn’t connect to, it should automatically show me the cache with a little warning that I wasn’t seeing the current thing.
So I’m on the airplane to visit my aunt on Nantucket Island. I want to develop my website in Visual Studio .NET (2005 of course) and I have to click the “work offline” in the browser in order to test things. Sounds fair enough to me.
Scrybe is an interesting example of a web application that exploits offline mode:
It hasn’t replaced Outlook / Google Calendar for me but it’s been fun to play with…
Wow! Not one mention of all those html-based “Help” files and other instructional documents, i.e., readme.html.
IMHO, the real problem with “off-line mode” is that it’s a weirdo menu item instead of being totally transparent. If I visit a bunch of web pages, and then go off the network, and then try to re-visit the web pages, IE should automatically just pull them out of cache. (It should also be nice and put up a “you are off-line” dialog)
Why? Because “work off-line” is scary. There’s no telling what it will do. Maybe it will wipe out my cache. Maybe when I go back on line it will try to ‘refresh’ all my cache, sucking up my bandwidth and give me an avalanche of pop-ups. Maybe if I set it to off-line, and then try to suck up some web pages for later viewing, it will just get in the way.
Even if I do use it – when? Before I take a plane trip so I have pages ready to read? After I visit the pages? How do I tell? Certainly not by reading the help file – ‘off-line’ isn’t even in the index! Trying “working offline” in ‘search’ gets me 'how to change your home page" (really!)
In short: it’s conceptually pointless and not documented.
And why not just visit pages and (manually) save them into a ‘web archive’. Double click on the resulting file and there’s the information again.
For the “World is not US” posters,
Jeff lives in the US. Jeff is from the US. From my understanding, Jeff works in the US. It would only seem appropriate that his statistic would be referring to the US. Though many of you make good points on applications not having some form of connectivity, but still need to function, many of you are not able to see around that statistic simply because you aren’t from the US. So the question is Who is more narrow-sighted, Jeff or you?
I would like offline mode to work, but it never seems to. I’ll be on a website, the site, or the net will go by by, but instead of pulling the site from cache, which it must have, it tells me it can’t find it. Stupid program.
does offline mode still matter in an increasingly online world
Yes, yes, and once more yes. I sell, install, support and train for a biotech/pharma software company, and being able to work offline is absolutely critical, and one of the reasons that much as I like Google Apps, they’re not a replacement for MS Office.
Lots of work gets done in planes, cars on the way to a customer and hotels which may or may not have an internet connection you can rely on (They all say they do, but it’s not as if they have network people standing by if something happens to their connection). And it’s also entirely possible that customers (at least in biotech and pharma) aren’t able to provide you with an outside internet connection.
For a web browser, it’s obviously not such a big deal to have offline mode, but for reading and answering emails, I find that it’s pretty key to have the ability to work offline and send/receive all the latest in the time between flights and/or whenever else there’s a connection available.