With today, Google has solved one of the main concerns of those who criticized the online applications. At Google Developer Day, the search giant launched Google Gears, an open source technology for creating offline web applications.

Google Gears is being made available in its early stages so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it.

"With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone."

Google offered a first example of what is possible: the Google Reader feed reader (http://reader.google.com) is available today with Gears-enabled offline capabilities.

After downloading the Gears browser extension, users will be able to view content in their Web browsers via Google Reader even when they’re not connected to the Internet. Content can only be updated when they are connected.

“What Gears is, first and foremost, is our attempt to address this limitation of Web applications,” says Linus Upson, director of engineering for Google Gears. “Today, Web applications tend not to work so well when you don’t have a net connection. This is the most common complaint consumers have when people use Web applications Google offers.”

Backing Gears publicly at this time are Adobe Systems Inc., Mozilla Corp. and Opera Software ASA, although Google is in confidential conversations with other IT vendors, Google officials said.