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Google Gears beta for Safari


Google Gears has been around for Firefox on the Mac for quite a while. However, Safari users have been left in the cold. Google Gears allows you to access certain Google services, most notably Docs and Reader, offline (as well as other offline-enabled web services like Remember The Milk). This week, a beta for Safari has become available.

With Google Gears, for example, you can view all of your Google Docs offline -- and even edit them (word processing docs only, spreadsheets and presentations are viewable but not editable). When you connect back to the internet, you will be able to sync the changes back to Google.

We're glad that Google has finally seen the light and released a version for our Safari-using counterparts. To make Google Gears work with Safari, you will need to download and install the Google Gears package for Mac OS X. Once installed, navigate to a "gears enabled" page, you will be able to use the Google Gears system. Remember, this is a beta and we've heard there might be issues if you've tweaked Safari in certain ways.

Oh, and there appears to be limited support for Fluid, which is nice.

[via the Apple blog]

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Google Gears has been around for Firefox on the Mac for quite a while. However, Safari users have been left in the cold. Google Gears...
 

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dmccullum

Nice! Now if only we can have offline Gmail, and compatibility with Fluid.app...

August 30 2008 at 6:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
willie

You should probably tell users that they need to install WebKit from nightly.webkit.org to use Gears.

August 29 2008 at 1:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Level 5

Good times, but I'd still say Safari doesn't quite hack it against FF3. We'll see how Safari 4 turns out.

August 29 2008 at 9:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Payne

Wow, it works great. Oops, I mean it doesn't work at all. Even if it did, caching Google Reader without caching ANY images if a great big FAIL. Google, please rework this to support images.

August 29 2008 at 2:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dion Almaer

Thanks for talking about this. I am really excited to see Gears work in Safari.

The original announcement is at: http://groups.google.com/group/gears-users/browse_thread/thread/36537d4f47c5495c

If you have any issues, it would be great if you wouldn't mind posting them there so our engineers see them.... and can thus look at fixing them!

One other minor thing.... it's "Gears" not "Google Gears" now!

Cheers,

Dion

Google, and Gears member

August 28 2008 at 4:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Federico Antin

This is all I can see:

Unable to load plug-in
The page "Gears" attempted to load an internet plug-in named "Gears 0.4.16.0", but the plug-in failed to load succesfully

August 28 2008 at 2:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
winkyeah

I wonder if this means they'll be getting it working for Safari on the iPhone. That would be awesome, to have local storage of my Remember the Milk tasks, and Google Docs on the iPhone.

August 28 2008 at 1:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ed

Boo! Doesn't work with Google Apps Documents, just regular Google Docs.

August 28 2008 at 1:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mzsanford

Download the Safari plugin from http://dl.google.com/gears/current/gears-osx-opt.dmg

August 28 2008 at 1:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
monkey_mad2

Nice, telling us about it but not giving a working link.

August 28 2008 at 1:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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