Offline Google Drive, Née Docs, Coming at Google I/O, Finally

Google's head of Chrome, Sundar Pichai, who also leads Google Drive efforts said that an offline version of the service is coming very soon, in five weeks' time. That may either sound great or confusing, depending on who you ask.

After all, isn't there an offline version of Google Drive already? They're called "files" and guess what, they can be viewed "offline." Google Drive is a cloud storage and file sync service at heart. It keeps a cloud copy of the files you place in a folder on your computer and also makes them available on the other devices you sync. Disconnect from your WiFi connection and you've still got all of your files right there on your computer. But there is an offline version of Google Drive coming, but the "Drive" Pichai refers to is actually Docs. And Google has been working on offline Google Docs that it's not even called Google Docs anymore.

Quite a while back, Google introduced a revamped and re-engineered version of Docs. It was a top-to-bottom redesign of the apps and it was a huge improvement. But it came with one big drawback, it didn't work offline. The previous Docs editors were able to use Google Gears for offline mode. But Google believed in HTML5 and deprecated Gears. HTML5 is well and fine, but offline Docs still isn't there. It seems that Google grossly underestimated just how hard it would be to create a version of Docs that worked locally using just HTML5 and associated technologies. And it's not just once, Google has been saying that offline Docs was just around the corner for so long that it had to come up with a crippled version just to shut people up. The current offline version allows people to view the files, but not edit them, making it useless in most cases.

But it seems that the full-blown version is finally here, launching at Chrome's I/O developer conference next month.

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