Actually Google changed it to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I didn't know about it, and now I'm just considering the possibilities. . . .

First of all, you'd need to feel pretty secure about what you were writing. It's another of those big Google Gropes for your privacy. Second, it's sure not gonna appeal to folk who already avoided GMail for that very reason.

For the ones who are left, it seems to me that you could be a very long way from home, carrying your trusty K-Meleon Portable on some sort of device with you. And even if you weren't connected, you could create word or spreadsheet files in anticipation of them ending up in Word (or, I guess, Excel eventually) way back home on your office computer.

At first chance (anytime at all if you were on wireless) you'd edit this data through Google's Docs & Spreadsheets. The formatting isn't sophisticated, but the point is, it's compatible with Word. So you could get a real headstart on things while you were in the middle of nowhere in the field.

I'm thinking of biologists, for example. Couldn't care less about security when the subject is motmots.

The old way was to spend weeks and even months transcribing, after returning home.

Then there have also been a few experiments storing files on GMail, anyway, including a Firefox extension to do that. I suppose Google was thinking of that when it took things much further by creating this quasi-word processor that is very agreeable to acting as a shortstop between your original data, your GMail, and your home/office base.

If you're not in love with Word, all this works just as well for OpenOffice, Google says.

Hmmm. . . .

Hi Carson,

Could you please mark off-topic threads with "OT" or something similar? It's the usual practice in Web forums and mailing lists.

You think this is off-topic? Gee whiz. So much time and effort has been placed on a portable version of K-Meleon, which was very experimental in how it might perform and what purposes it might fulfil. I think the whole idea of portability with an efficient, lightweight browser that works on old 98s is the epitome of what K-Meleon stands for.

In other threads, I initiated a discussion about whether we needed to segregate off-topic ideas entirely; and that is on-going. But marrying the portable version of K-M with Google's proposal, and perhaps even further with an OS on a portable device, is not off-topic.

Hi Carson,

First of all, I'm sorry if I offended you. I assumed you weren't familiar with the "OT" tagging and thought it was the reason you didn't mark it such.

About the off-topicness, I still think this is off topic, but I see that you disagree. Oh well, I suppose our thresholds are different. I won't push the issue further.

Thanks, rmn. And for my part, I'll mark [O-T] on those we agree on; and I'm sure we'd agree on almost all of them.

Well, my daughter has just started university and she's using that very combination of Pocket K-Meleon and Writely to be able to access her documents in various places. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably fast and certainly usable.

Maybe we need an "Applications" forum!