IT Starting To Pay Attention With Google Gears

Google this week debuted Google Gears, an open-source project centered around a new browser extension that enables Web applications to run offline.

Together with this week's acquisition of browser security vendor GreenBorder Technologies, Google has greatly accelerated its focus on building--and helping IT build--truly useful Web applications.Google Gears is an early-stage project that the company said it ultimately hopes will emerge as a standard for delivering offline Web applications. Google is offering technology as free and fully open source. It also released a Gears-enabled version of its Google Reader to showcase the offline capabilities.

Vendors Mozilla, Opera and Adobe came out in support of Google Gears, saying they will work with Google on the project.

Google Gears is based on new JavaScript APIs that enable data storage, application caching and multithreading features within Web apps. Google said the APIs work with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google Gears is available now at http://gears.google.com/.