A quick note to mention a small but important feature added by Zoho to their online office suite today – a plugin called QuickRead. It’s available as a plugin for Firefox and IE on Zoho Writer and will be on their spreadsheet and presentation applications soon as well.

Users of this plugin can open office documents (Word for now) directly on the internet without first downloading it to their hard drive and opening it with a desktop application. Instead, you simply right click on the link and choose “Open with Zoho Writer”. For a more detailed description of QuickRead, see Zoho’s blog post about it.

Why is this important? Because it removes one more reason people must have Microsoft Office installed on their machines. Of course, before this plugin was available people could simply download the document and then upload it to Zoho (or Writely) and open it. The plugin just reduces the number of steps required down to one – a right click. Zoho is paying attention to the details, which suggests they will be successful. They have come a long, long way since we first wrote about them nearly a year ago.