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Google Docs going offline soon?

Google appears to be testing offline access for Google Docs, according to screen shots on Blogoscoped.

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Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills

Looks like Google is hard at work on offline access to Google Docs. Google Blogoscoped has screenshots of what looks like the beginnings of such a service.

No doubt Google will try to enable offline access for all of its Web apps. This was pretty apparent when the company announced Google Gears last May. Google Gears is a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The Blogoscoped screenshots appear to be the first public evidence of such testing.

In response to questions, a Google representative said: "We're working on enabling many of our applications to work with Google Gears, but we don't have anything more specific to share at this time."

Enabling offline access to its Web apps would further intensify the competition between Google and Microsoft, whose desktop application dominance is threatened by Web-based apps.