Firefox 3 to support ‘Active Offline’ Applications

Rod Drury reports that Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla revealed plans to support active offline web applications in upcoming Firefox 3.0 .

This means, Firefox 3 local storage system will be a major upgrade to the current WHATWG DOM Storage. The current persistence limit of 5MB per domain will have to be upgraded significantly. It would be interesting to see if they support removable media (USB Sticks etc.) as a single point storage destination.

What we need next is a new breed of applications, which makes use of local storage. Google Apps would be most desired ones to be rewritten to this new paradigm. Needless to say, other browsers have to support local storage in a standardized way. The implementation of this storage could follow the tried and tested API/SPI model. WHATWG has submitted their proposals to W3C.

Will these Active offline applications needs to take the help(form?!) of Extensions’ are yet to be known. If so the proposed storage improvements will be made to be SQLite persistence engine of the browser core.

I am sure, active offline applications would improve the ‘Always on’ feel of AJAX applications. More on such innovative applications later…!

Some Related Links:-

http://manual.dojotoolkit.org/WikiHome/DojoDotBook/Book50

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a1/releasenotes/

Technorati tags: “Active Offline”, “Firefox 3.0″