jeffsharris

You're going to see offline start to roll out later this summer. We used to have offline with Google Gears, but it became pretty clear that plugins weren't the right approach. We've been reimplementing offline using HTML5 standards like AppCache, File API, and IndexDB.

We're some of the first webapps that are really putting those standards to the test, so it's taken a while to iron out the kinks.

Well, we will launch in whatever incremental pieces make sense. But the long term direction is if you access a Doc URL while offline, it should open the local copy of the doc and let you edit. When you go online all your edits get synced in the background. You should also be able to see a list of your docs while offline.

We'll need to work through all the tricky problems with how to merge conflicting edits. It's fun stuff.

You're going to see lots and lots of improvements to the mobile experience, including a bunch of things that you mentioned. Stay tuned...

For the "Untitled document" problem ... it's definitely something we're thinking about. The nuance is that we want to provide a consistent experience across our editors, and it's much harder to autotitle something like a drawing or a spreadsheet. But I've got a 12 "Untitled document"s in my doclist now, so we haven't found the right balance.

At a minimum, we should be prompting when you try to close a doc without a title (and autofilling the start of your doc in that prompt).

Lots of surprising challenges. A couple that seemed easy, but weren't:

1) Handling zooming on Webkit. Webkit doesn't maintain enough precision to properly measure things if people are zoomed. This bug has more details ... but making things like cursor positioning work while zoomed was super difficult. Thankfully, the core problem is being fixed in Webkit.

2) Handling multiple connections. Browsers impose a limit of 6 open connections to a domain at once. So in our first implementation, we could only have 6 docs that got realtime updates at a given time. Working around that, and letting you have arbitrarily many docs open was really really tough.

For features. We hope that we'll never have as many features as some of the desktop editors because simplicity is important. But that said, there are still lots of awesome features from the desktop that we should and will implement.

In terms of why we're doing this. We just saw that a few other Google teams had done it and it seemed really fun. No marketing pressure on this one.

I'd say the two biggest technology challenges are 1) Speed. Making complicated webapps fast is still pretty tough. 2) Scale. We need to handle many many machines, machines that can break at any time, machines that can be accessed from anywhere. Making all that seamlessly work for millions of people was and is a huge effort.