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.