Gears for Safari Now Available

Josh Pigford — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:47:10 +0000

Gears, Google’s “browser improver” (for lack of a better term), has come out of beta and is now officially available for Safari.

Gears is a browser plugin that extends its functionality by allowing it do things like store data locally in a searchable database as well as run JavaScript in the background to improve performance. A common example of its use is to allow web applications to be accessed offline.

Gears requires an applications developer to implement the functionality in to their site, so there aren’t a huge number of sites that make use of Gears.

A few that currently do:

If you’re a developer, you can checkout the Gears API and get started on implementing it in to your site.

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Google Gears (Beta) [Finally] Comes To Safari

Bob Rudis — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:00:07 +0000

Spotlight importers aren’t the only symbols of Mac-generosity coming from the fine folks over at Google. The Google Gears project has released a beta of their browser code which enables developers to make web apps that behave more like local desktop apps and allow some – or complete – functionality even when you are not connected to the Internet (Google Reader being a very good example). When you come across a “Gears-enabled” application, your browser will prompt you to see if you trust this particular application enough to let it have access to your local filesystem:

It appears to store data in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Google Gears for Safari, so this would be a good folder to check from time-to-time (remember lsof is your friend) and the database files that are stored use SQLite, so you can peruse them from the command-line or via various GUI’s (one mentioned just recently).

Being a beta release, there are issues and you can add your own newfound bugs to the list as you come across them.

You’ll need Safari 3.1.1 at a minimum (and OS X 10.4.11/10.5.3). I’ve confirmed that it works with Safari 3.1.2. No word on Safari for Windows compatibility (let us know!) and don’t count on Mobile Safari support anytime soon.

If you give the beta a go, let us know your experiences and if you are a developer with a Gears-enabled application, drop the URL in the comments for all the TAB-world to see!

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GigaOM » Apple

Gears for Safari Now Available

Google Gears (Beta) [Finally] Comes To Safari