Google announced an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline.
The browser extension will work with any Gears-enabled application. Though Google is working with Adobe, as well as browser makers Opera, Gears sounds like a project that will compete with One of the first projects for Google Gears is a new version of the Google Reader for RSS feeds. The comapny's We gave the offline reader option a try on one of our machines, and noticed one immediate improvement the offline experience has over the online one. It's a heck of a lot faster in performance working with those 2,000 items locally, rather than waiting for Reader to churn through the next 60 items in the Boing Boing feed. Google Gears only grabbed the text from the feeds, though. No images or videos offline. That certainly helps the download speed in getting feeds into the Gears database, but in the case of feeds like Boing Boing's it really kills the more interesting parts of many of their posts.
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