Google continues to seed Gears throughout the Web. Not only does Google’s new Chrome browser come ready-equipped with Gears, but now the company has quickly moved Gears for Safari out of beta and into general release. Since Gears was already available for Firefox and IE, this means Gears now runs on the lion’s share of today’s browsers. And that means that Google’s strategy of bolstering online applications with offline functionality is set to get some traction.
The new Gears for Safari is designed for OSX (at least Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11), according to the blog post announcing its debut. It sports the ability to create desktop shortcuts for websites, as well as Blobs support (for resumable uploads of large files).
The news is another in a string of Gears announcements, including the new geolocation API and Gears’ expected support within Gmail and Calendar. Google keeps hacking away at the online/offline problem of cloud computing, and the wider the adoption of Gears, the more its strategy will pay off.
