Google Gears Brings Offline Web Applications To Life

May 30, 2007 at 7:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Today at Google Developer Day 2007, Google released Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser extension that will help developers create offline web applications in the open source framework. Gears is powered by JavaScript APIs enabling data storage, application caching, and multi-threading technologies for offline browsing and application use.

Google Reader is the first online application to offer “Gears-enabled offline capabilities,” Google told me. So you would load up Google Reader while you are online, it will download your feeds. Then you can go to the beach, away from all Internet connections, open your browser and browse through those feeds. When you are back to your Internet connection, Google Reader will sync up through Google Gears and update Google Reader with the feeds you read while offline, as well as download any new feeds you have not read yet.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

For more about what is going on at Google Developer Day 2007, see http://code.google.com/events/developerday/.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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