The upcoming Firefox 3.0 will include an innovative function that allows its users to access a service or a website even from offline mode without any Internet connection. Last week on Friday, the Mountain View company Google debuted Google Gears, a special browser extension that allows almost the same thing, allowing the users to choose if a service can be accessed from offline mode or not. Along with the Firefox plug-in, Google also rolled out the first service that is compatible with it: Google Reader, the web-based RSS client. Although it is not quite clear if Mozilla plans to implement the Google extension into Firefox 3.0, the offline support was already confirmed by Mike Shaver, Mozilla's director or ecosystem development.

"There's no question that Firefox 3.0, scheduled to launch later this year, will work with offline applications. Gears is a set of capabilities, three powerful primitives being added to the Web 2.0 platform. There haven't been a lot of big flag days in the Web, but Gears will create an explosion of Web apps, in a good way, in a creative way," Mike Shaver said according to PC World.

It's the way forward for the Web. We're talking to Google engineers and looking at how these two models -- ours and theirs -- compare. This is in the open now, and going forward we'll see what we can learn from each other. But there's a lot of work that's been done already on Firefox 3.0 and we're not planning to throw that work away," he continued.

Firefox 3.0 is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2007, bringing a lot of new features bundled in an Internet browser. At this time, Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers on the market, being regarded as the most powerful alternative for the old-fashioned Internet Explorer included in Microsoft's Windows.