I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.

"It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that."

Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it?

Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down.

You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals.

You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.