Google has always given a helping hand to open source browsers e.g. Firefox so that they can give their users a better and enhanced browsing and usage experience. Google has a number of browser extensions targeted for firefox that give a face lift to the firefox speed browsing and easy usability. Google Gears brings a new similar concept.

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. The main idea is to enable web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs. Google Gears is currently an early-access developers’ release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time.

Google Gears Features

Google Gears provides three key features:

1. A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
2. A database, to store and access data from within the browser
3. A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Google Gears Requirements

The minimum system requirements to run Google Gears are:

• Windows XP/Vista
• Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+
Google Gears (BETA) is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux