With many browsers adding proper local storage support (and with this whole HTML5 buzz), there is a lot of talk about offline web apps competing with desktop software. But, as a matter of fact – one quick “clear private data” on your browser (which a lot of people do) – clears all the local storage data.
I’m now thinking that local storage in browsers can at best be used to cache data temporarily before being sync-ed with the web server, but truly offline web applications can’t rely on HTML5’s local storage permanently due to the problem I outlined above.
Is there a scope for offline web applications that actually depend on data extensively?
My take on this is that the offline capability of online web apps can compete with desktop software, but not pure offline web-apps.
Why? Well, the major drawback of online web apps was what happens when you lose your network connection when doing any work. Seeing as this can be resolved now, the competition is truly on. Imagine editing a document online, then move around without internet, come back online and then sync the changes and continue to work as if nothing happened. That is truly awesome.
For this to work, the browser should allow to store data in a location that you can pick which would mean access to OS layer, which will probably not happen anytime soon…