Google has been notoriously slow on getting product into the hands of Mac users lately, and Gears is no exception. After a bit of a wait they have finally released Google Gears for Mac users browsing with Safari.

Just how long is “a bit” of a wait? For Google Gears’ Safari version it was a whopping 16 months long. That’s a huge lag in an era when there should be a much more universal delivery system for applications and much less time delay between versions. Some techies like Louis Gray even say that in this day and age we shouldn’t be dealing with platform or browser version based issues at all, and instead should already have a plethora of universal applications.

After waiting so long for the ability to play with Gears, what have Safari users been missing? The biggest thing that Safari users have been left out of is the ability to take sites that have Google Gears enabled offline to use them. What sites are listed on the Google Mac blog as being Gears compatible? WordPress, YouTube’s uploader, Zoho, Google’s Reader are the ones listed, but any site that has Gears compatibility I imagine would work.

I can’t say as I see a huge use for Gears. I’ve had it enabled on fireFox for the Mac before and never once found a need to use it. That said, if you use Google Reader of Google docs, that functionality may be useful. There have been a few times I’ve heard people with they had their feeds when offline, and Google Reader combined with Gears would give you that ability to read your feeds on the go or work on your documents when you aren’t connected.

Google also mentions that Gears works with third party browsers like Fluid. This is possible using WebKit, and according to Google it is a fairly intuitive interface:

On the Mac, Gears desktop shortcuts are actually small applications that are designed to open the website in the same browser they were originally created from. This means that if you created them from a Fluid app they’ll open in that same place and if you’ve got multiple versions of Firefox installed on your machine the shortcut will open in the right one.

You can download Google Gears for Safari on the Google Mac site.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 10:04 am under Free Software.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
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