Safari gets Gears

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 16 Sep 2008 at 16:00

Google has finally released the official version of Gears for Safari on Mac OS X.

Gears essentially allows internet-based apps such as Google Docs and Zoho to run offline through a web browser, and with the official release Mac users running Safari now have the same offline capability as Windows users.

Gears was originally dubbed Google Gears but the name was changed back in May to reflect the open-source nature of the project. Since then the company has been working to bring the project to Safari and released a beta into the wild three weeks ago.

Gears is already compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux, however, Google has still not announced when Gears will make an appearance on Opera or Safari for Windows.

Those looking to get into Gears will need version 3.1.1 or higher of Safari, along with a machine running the most recent build of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5.3 (Leopard).

Google is expected to announce support for Gmail and Calendar soon.