Google Introduces "Gears" - Windows Offline Browsing Plug-In

Following yesterday’s unique introduction of Street-View-enabled maps, Google has released the Google Gears beta plug-in for Windows (Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+).  Essentially, Gears allows you to take your applications offline by creating a local, searchable database containing the elements needed to power the “Web-based” application while offline.  In order for the offline functionality to work for your favorite Web 2.0 app, however, the company making the app needs to have enabled Gears-compatibility - accomplished by taking advantage of the Google Gears API which was also released today.  The first implementation of this type of functionality seems to be coming from Google’s own RSS reader: Google Reader.

Meanwhile, Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, announced back in February that support for offline applications would be enabled from within the Firefox 3 browser. While they specified that the code for this feature would be coming straight from Mozilla as “open standards,” plans could have shifted and Google Gears could potentially be what powers this feature given Google’s deep relationship with Mozilla.  However, while Google and Mozilla seem to be getting cozy together, the relationship between Google and Microsoft is an entirely different story…and we can’t emphasize that enough.  So, given that relationship, we’ll be curious to see how Microsoft will be reacting to this new product.  That said, we don’t anticipate much time before Microsoft announces its own, probably proprietary, offline browsing functionality.

Check out the plug-in here: http://gears.google.com/

Then, check out Google’s official announcement of Gears, as well as “Google Development Day,” here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

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