Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?
I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1]
Yes these technologies have been around for several years. Unfortunately none of them are stable/reliable/easy to reason about.
WebSQL (SQLite) has been ignored by Mozilla, on the stated basis that an independent implementation of WebSQL would be too difficult to build. They advocated that a database designed by committee would be better for the web than the most widely deployed database in the world. They deprecated WebSQL before IndexedDB was given a chance to prove itself. Unfortunately they also said that anyone could build SQLite on top of IDB if they chose to. Firefox have implemented IDB on top of SQLite. IDB is at least an order of magnitude slower than SQLite.
LocalStorage is capped at approximately 10mb and there are no quota apis to adjust this. It is not likely that this will change and there has been discussion on the Public Web Apps over whether LocalStorage should also be deprecated in favor of IDB.
ApplicationCache works well but it's designed for caching code and html and it's not an alternative to IDB.
IndexedDB is high-level and "to-do list" friendly. It is not primarily focused on providing library authors with performant low-level storage primitives (BTree, KV) with which to work. The specification is exceedingly complex and so is the API. Chrome has implemented IDB on top of LevelDB which is a terrific storage engine. Exposing something like LevelDB directly would be more useful and make for a powerful, flexible API to boot. IDB has problems with inadvertently capturing application state bubbles. Indexes must be predefined and then migrated at the database layer, the application has no say over indexing. I'm not sure if IDB supports indexing object array values yet. IDB claims to support MVC yet most implementations cause writers to block readers and even readers to block other readers.
Edit:
Mozilla don't plan to support the FileSystem API.
It's not clear that all browsers will provide persistent storage guarantees. At least Mozilla have said that they may treat client-side storage as evict-able at the discretion of the user agent (as opposed to user), rather than as persistent storage. I'm not sure if the specifications have been updated to enforce some kind of guarantee on the part of user agents.
Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions.
In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism.
Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365).
Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?