Browser Security News

I woke up Saturday morning to an email from Sun’s Francois "Mr. JavaDB" Orsini that alerted me to Google Browser Sync. If you’ve caught any of my previous blogs about JavaDB, then you know that I’m pretty excited about its potential to solve the so called "offline" problem with Web based applications like the recently released Google Spreadsheets. Also referred to as "Webless applications," what’s a Web driven application to do when it has no Web to get its directions from or save its files to? JavaDB has the potential to solve that problem because it uses a browser’s Java compatibility (usually a plug-in) to store just about anything (data, HTML pages with Javascript, etc.) in a cache that technically doesn’t require a separate filesystem.

The idea I’ve been pitching to Orsini is the one where I’m on an airplane with no Web connection and I want to author a WordPress-based blog or write some Yahoo Mail-based mail. Theoretically, with JavaDB, I should just be able to fire up my browser, go to my bookmarks for either of those applications, bring up the blog or email authoring page, finish my work, and press the submit button. It could all work just as though I’m on the Web. But where the magic could really come in is what happens the first time I reconnect to the Web. Upon such reconnection, the Yahoo Mail I wrote would automatically synch up with the real Yahoo Mail and the blogs I wrote would automatically synch up with ZDNet’s WordPress installation. » Google Browser Sync: Two steps away from besting Yahoo’s del.icio.us? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com