Google Releases Gears Plug-in Beta for Apple Safari Browser
September 16, 2008
Google Gears is now available for Apple’s Safari Web browser. Gears is a plug-in that extends Safari browser to create a richer platform for web applications. For example, webmasters can use Gears on their websites to let users access information offline or provide you with content based on your geographical location.
Gears was designed to be used on both Google and non-Google sites. A number of web applications currently make use of Gears, including two Google products: Google Reader and Google Docs. Additionally, Zoho and Remember the Milk have been using Gears since its original launch.
Released under the BSD license, Gears is free and open source software. Currently, Gears is supported on Google Chrome and IE 6+ on Windows XP and Vista, IE Mobile 4.01+ on Windows Mobile, Safari 3.1.1+ on Mac OS X 10.4+ and Firefox 1.5+ on multiple platforms. Opera ASA recently announced that the new Opera Mobile 9.5 will also support Gears.
Users are cautioned that Gears is still BETA (testing phase) and not an official release. “We are excited to share a beta version of Gears for Safari with you!! We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases,” - said Google’s Jeremy Moskovich on the Gears users mailing list Monday.
There are several major API components to Gears including a Database module (powered by SQLite) that can store data locally, a WorkerPool module that provides parallel execution of JavaScript code in the background to improve performance, and a Desktop module that lets web applications interact more naturally with the desktop. You can view a list of known bugs here and new bugs can be filed on Google’s Gears code tracker page. Are you ready to test it? If yes, then follow this link to download Gears for Safari!
We are waithing for this unique web browser to become operational. It really would revolutionize web browsing.
http://www.safaribrowserwindows.com
It’s great that Google Gear is starting to support most of the browsers in the market even though it is still in beta version. I’m a big fan of Google Gears through Google Reader and Google Docs. I use Google Docs a lot for managing our requirement documentations.
But I hardly believe that Safari is reaching anyway near the Firefox or IE popularity in near future.