One feature that was removed from Chrome during its latest release was the ability to store information while you were offline. That capability will be returning sometime later on this year. So why was it removed in the first place?

Offline access in previous versions of Chrome were provided with a technology called Google Gears. Because of a modern web technology called HTML5, Gears was no longer needed and therefore Google decided to stop supporting it over a period of time.

But this presented a problem. One of Google’s biggest concerns regarding the process switching from Gears to HTML5 was that they did not want under any circumstance for any users to lose saved email that was stored offline. So they decided to remove it from Chrome 12 and have emails that were in offline storage automatically sent.

So when will we see the new HTML5 offline capability in Gmail? It is slated to arrive sometime this summer. Your Chrome browser will be automatically updated and you’ll this feature once again. You can find out what version of Chrome you have by clicking on the wrench icon and selecting “About Google Chrome”.