At Sat, 7 Jul 2012 21:57:06 +0200, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote: > My problem with them dropping Thunderbird is, I don't see some important > problems solved that should be solved before everyone uses webclients. > Webclients assume you are always online, but - at least in Germany - being > always online still is more of a marketing promise than a usable reality. > > I don't see how I would always have enough bandwidth to download everything > required to run a fat web client that does mail. Neither do I see my browser > being able to do what a mail client can do in offline mode. How would you use > your mail/groupware client when you are offline in a browser? Tell a sales > person he will have to use a webclient that does mail to download contract > papers while he's on the road somewhere in the outback…
You do that by using the application cache and local storage/websql/indexeddb. The application cache will download the whole html5 application and keep it on your computer, you will only need to download it again when a new version is released and so it will be there when you are offline. Not much different than having to download, install and update thunderbird, except that's a lot less hassle. For the data you can use local storage, websql or IndexedDB and that will also be available offline. Instead of asking the web server everytime it needs some data, a HTML5 application should sync the data between the webserver and it's locally stored copy of the data and always work from the localle stored copy. The only real challenge is the maximum size of that storage and the differences between browsers if you want to use more. If you're using IndexedDB on Firefox and using more than 50 MB, Firefox simply asks the user for permission, but Chrome has a smaller limit and doesn't have the possibility to ask for more. You can work around that by putting your app in the chrome store and ask for the unlimitedstorage permission. So while there are still a few small challenges, it's already posssible to create an offline HTML5 e-mail client today. Kind regards, Jeroen Dekkers -- [email protected] https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
