For those who aren’t in the know:

“Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

Google’s own web-apps take advantage of Gears, and other CMS’s are adding the ability to take advantage of it. Google writes:

“Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline. Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone”

As of version 2.6 WordPress has enabled users of Gears to enhance the speed of the WordPress admin, and allow for offline publishing of entries.

Having installed it today and used for the afternoon I can say that I’ll be using Gears with Safari on all WordPress blogs going forward- the sheer speed in load time for operations in the admin make it worthwhile.

I’m mostly connected to the internet everywhere I work, so I have no need for offline publishing? but the addition of the local cache for WordPress was a very savvy move for us power users and developers, and I’m glad Google has supported Safari in it’s efforts early in the project.

I wrote a post a while ago about Google Gears, and how I wasn’t entirely convinced it’s the solution to the current problems on the internet. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s essentially a plugin you install in your browser that, when coupled with some javascript code, will give certain webpages the ability to offline content onto your hard drive. An example of this is Google reader — I believe if you have Google Gears installed you can manually download content to disk and view it offline later.

First, I have to ask, is that really necessary? The whole premise behind Google Gears is the assumption that people want to access a bunch of web pages even when they are offline. But is that accurate? Would it help if I could access the WordPress dashboard offline and write an entry? Maybe, but I can just jot one down in Word or VI real quick if I need to. What about the Google Reader example? Sure, it’s neat. But considering many of the blogs I subscribe to only provide excerpts and not full entries, it’s basically useless to me to unless I can get at the actual site. Same goes for comments. If I have a comment or suggestion while reading, am I really going to remember to log back online later, head over to the real site, and jot it down? I doubt it.

Also, how often are most of you offline nowadays? Google Gears seems to be basically targeted at the hardcore geek market right now. But seriously, most tech-savy places (other than Canada) already have realistic prices for unlimited wireless data plans. Except for airplanes, most people have the ability to be online almost all the time already, so is it worth the effort (that is, rewriting websites to work with Google Gears) to allow people to use them when offline?

There’s another aspect to Google Gears where apparently it can download an entire CSS/JS/IMG bundle from the webserver and store it locally. The idea behind this being that you can serve up the content rather quickly, and without an internet connection. This is basically HTTP caching, which has been around for years (although, you still need a connection to do proper HTTP caching). But in my mind, that functionality isn’t very useful if, after loading, you can’t utilize the same functionality of the website that you’re used to when it’s online. Sure, I can sit and look at a pretty website offline, but if I can’t interact with it, or follow links, is it useful?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Google Gears is all everyone thinks it will be, and it will spawn the next generation of amazing applications. I hope so. But let’s take a quick look at what other people are saying about it. We’ll utilize Google’s Trends service for that. Gander, if you will, at the following chart, which compares internet buzz for three things: 1) Google Gears 2) WordPress and 3) everyone’s favourite 50 year-old meat product, the hamburger.

As you can see, WordPress generates a ton of interest, as it should. But looking at Google Gears, it’s been basically flat, with only a few random blips when Google throws a bunch of press out about it. In fact, when compared to the hamburger, it’s hard to tell what people find more interesting, the food, or the offline content delivery system.

You want some fries with that content?

Photo from here