Hands on: Google enables Offline editing for Google Docs

Back at Google I/O, the company had announced a long awaited feature for its web-based Google Docs Office suite – offline editing. Today, Google has enabled this feature for the legions of Google Docs users all over the world. Interesting as it is, this offline editing feature does not work by way of a dedicated local application, but it still works inside the browser.
To activate the offline editing one has to go into the settings tab on the main Google Drive landing page and activate a button, which says ‘Set up Offline Docs Beta’. If one is using Chrome then it will also ask you to install a Chrome Google Drive app, which activates offline editing. While testing this we also found out that this feature is only enabled for the Google Chrome browser, so if you are using a browser like Mozilla Firefox it will not work. (I have not tried it on Safari or Internet Explorer.)
The cool bit about this is that it can switch between online and offline editing on the fly and it informs the user when the Internet connection has been disabled with a pop up, to enable offline mode. But when Internet connection is active, it seamlessly integrates the content to its online state and all changes made to a document in the offline state will sync to a online file.
One can even open documents that have been synced in the document list in offline mode, giving the user the flexibility to not only edit the doc he/she was working on, but also access other documents that had been synced up to Google Drive, giving the whole Google Docs experience a more local/native application like feel.
But of course, the offline element comes with its own share of tradeoffs like the absence of features like sharing, printing, publishing, inserting images, drawing, and tools for researching and translation.
Google has said that the offline functionality will come soon to the Spreadsheet and Presentation applications of the Google Docs suite, however it has not outlined any specific timeline. Additionally, we will prefer that Google adds the offline functionality to other browsers as well and not restrict users to its own Chrome browser.
PS: Written on Google Docs, Offline