Google Docs Offline Gets a Small Update, Now Uses the Modern Docs Look

Google has been falling short on its promise to make its most popular services work online. Using HTML5 for this turned out to be harder than it expected, so people have been left without any offline support in Google Docs or Gmail for months now, even longer in some cases.

Google promised that offline support was coming this summer. On the very last day of summer, Google did debut a few tools to add offline support to Gmail, Docs and Calendar, but it was hardly what people expected.

Support was limited, it involved several steps and what you get offline is hardly on par with the online experience.

Google has been staying quiet on this front and there doesn't seem to be any major change coming any time soon. But some improvements are here, the offline Google Docs now sports a new look, based on the updated Google and Docs one, as Google OS noticed.

But it's only the documents list that's been updated with the new look, documents and spreadsheets editors, well, viewers actually, since they only work in read-only mode in offline, still sport the ancient Docs design.

There is plenty of way to go still, but, at least Google is doing something. Expect more of these small updates to become available in time, though, at the rate Google is moving, a big change is not coming very soon.

Offline support in Google Docs is fairly limited, you can store your most recent 100 documents locally and then view documents and spreadsheets. But you can't edit them, a big drawback. What's more you need the Google Docs Chrome app for this to work. Obviously, offline support only works in Chrome.

Gmail users have it even worse in some aspects, they get a completely different version of the Gmail app, based on the mobile and tablet apps. On the other hand, they can continue to edit and create new emails even when offline.