Google Gears Returns to Firefox
Firefox users can once again access their Gmail accounts without an internet connection.
Google has updated its popular Gears add-on to work with the latest version of Firefox. It took a while to get here, though. Firefox 3.5 was released on June 30, and Gears dropped two weeks later, on July 14. The older version of Gears didn’t work with the new browser, so anyone who upgraded to Firefox 3.5 when it was first released had to wait for the update.
It wasn’t much of an inconvenience for most of us, but add-on developers usually begin porting their tiny apps to a new version of a browser as soon as the release candidates appear. In Firefox’s case, the first release candidate arrived about three weeks before the final code. For a company with as many resources as Google, such a delay is uncharacteristic. Some impatient users even hacked together their own unofficial versions of Gears.
You can get the update by visiting the Google Gears homepage or by launching Firefox’s add-ons manager and checking for updates.
Gears is an essential add-on for Firefox, as it gives the browser the ability to run some popular web apps offline. It stores data from the web app to a database on your local machine, then syncs up again when an internet connection becomes available. Gears also lets the browser use your computer to process complicated JavaScript tasks, making heavy web apps run more smoothly, and it can be used to power the geolocation abilities of apps like Google Maps.
The free software add-on is a key ingredient in the fulfillment of many of the promises of HTML 5, the markup language which makes these tasks possible and which is currently powering the next generation of web apps. As people increasingly turn towards hosted web apps for things like e-mail and document editing, the ability to access those applications while offline becomes all the more critical.
Gears add-ons are available for Internet Explorer and Safari, plus Opera Mobile and the Android browser (see a full list). The same functionality is also available in Google’s Chrome browser.
Mozilla is also covering some of the same ground as Gears with its own Geode geolocation software, which started as an add-on but has been rolled in to the latest version of Firefox. In April, Mozilla selected Google’s Location service — the web service which provides location data to all of Google’s geo-aware apps — to power Firefox 3.5’s location queries.
Since Gears makes use of a person’s local machine, and since it has the ability to sniff that person’s whereabouts, the enhanced experience it provides is entirely opt-in.
Web developers need to specifically build their sites to work with Gears. When a user visits a site with a Gears-enabled web app, a message pops up that says, “This website wants to use Gears.” If the user trusts the site, they can allow the site to run Gears, enabling the local data, local processing and geolocation abilities.
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