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The soon-to-be-released Firefox 3 provides offline support for web apps. This means that people using webmail on a train, for example, could continue to write new messages even if the connection dips, and then resynch with the webmail server when the connection resumes.

Firefox 3's offline support is based on the HTML 5 standard for offline caching, but currently only works

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with test applications. Mozilla is hoping that companies such as Google and Microsoft will unite around a single standard, so that web app developers don't have to support multiple offline modes.

"If Microsoft wanted to develop this into its browser, it can do," Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe told PC Pro this afternoon.

Google already has its own offline mode, called Google Gears, which works with apps such as its RSS feed reader in multiple browsers. "We hope that Google Gears and this new standard will merge," Nitot said.

Nitot claims the increased shift towards online apps was the main motivation for addressing Firefox's memory leaks, which saw the browser hog more system resources the longer it was used. "Now, most apps are moving to 'the cloud' and running inside the browser," he claimed. "Memory management inside the browser is becoming more of an issue. This why we've invested so much time in memory management."