Google Gears up Safari support

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 28 August 2008 04:54

Business IT - Open Source

That's because it sounds as if there's still a lot of work still to be done before Gears for Safari is ready for general use.

Announcing the beta, Google's Jeremy Moskovich observed "Chances are it will break your browser. Please proceed with caution."

The beta sends crash reports to Goole, he noted. "This is important for us, since one of the major goals of this release is to gauge stability."

So, if you're one of those beta-test happy early adopters, this latest release is one you'll want to monkey around with, fully expecting things to jam up every now and then. Otherwise fear not - Google's developers are hard to work and will no doubt have a 'real' Gears for Safari for the rest of us reasonably soon.

But there's no indication of when an iPhone and iPod touch version of Gears will appear for the Safari browser on those Apple iDevices, nor for Safari browser on Symbian based smartphones from Nokia and Samsung. We can only hope that Google is crunching its gears to eventually work on those devices, too.

In related news, Gears was recently updated to version 0.4. New features include support for geolocation using mobile phone towers or GPS, the Blob API for handling things such as files and images, and localisation in 40 languages.

Ah, Gears - it's almost like driving through the web's clouds on automatic!