Google Gears up Safari support

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 28 August 2008 04:54

Open Source

The Google love-in with Apple gears up to a new level with the arrival of a beta release of Gears that's compatible with Apple's Safari. It's welcome news, bringing nearer the prospect of running offline web applications in Mac OS X's native browser.

The open source Gears peoject is Google's way to win the hearts and minds of those who love to work and play "in the cloud", by enabling developers to create AJAX applications that continue to work when the Internet connection is broken.

This is especially convenient for cloud-loving mobile users, who would, for example, be able to access web mail or a web-based calendar while offline.

How's it done? Well, it's achieved in part by storing data locally in an SQL database (transparently to the user) and synchronising it with the web application when the connection is restored.

Web applications already taking advantage of Gears include Google Reader, Google Docs, Zoho and Remember the Milk.

Prior to this week, Gears was only available on Mac OS X for Firefox, and that's still the case for the release version. Firefox is also the supported browser on Windows and Linux, plus Internet Explorer for Windows.

The Gears for Safari beta requires at least Safari 3.1.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.3.

But Mac users who prefer Safari to Firefox probably shouldn't switch their gears into overdrive just yet. Find out why on page two.