Offline gmail: advert-free!

I see Google have got around to activating Gears for GMail: this means, after some background synchronising, you can use search through your email without being connected to the web. This is great news, because GMail is one of those few web apps that are actually better than their desktop counterparts (although Thunderbird was alright as I recall, it’s been a while since I used it though). Of course there is the privacy / gBig gBrother angle, which puts a lot of people off using GMail. But there’s no doubt it’s an excellent application, the poster child for cloud computing, you could say.

What’s good about offline mode in Gmail is that you don’t have to put up with adverts displayed alongside your information (at least, that’s the case at the moment). It’s kind of funny too that the whole app is officially still in beta – and has been for years, despite being far more stable than much officially released software – so for these new features, they have to come up with another name, so Gears for Gmail is in “Labs”.