Safari Gears up for Mac fanboys

Google dishes out support for Apple browser

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 16th September 2008 11:39 GMT

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After months of development Gears is finally available for Apple’s Safari web browser.

This is Google’s latest attempt to dig its nails into Microsoft’s proprietary software kingdom by opening its arms to the Mac brigade, who are perhaps more reluctant than most to run MS apps.

Originally dubbed Google Gears, the online/offline apps project had its moniker truncated in May because the internet giant sees it as an open source Silicon Valley love-in for cloud computing-obsessed web programmers.

It allows internet-based applications such as Google Docs, Google Reader, YouTube, Wordpress and Zoho to run offline via a web browser. It’s widely expected that Gears support for Google’s Gmail and Calendar will land soon.

Gears already runs on Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. However, there’s still no word on when Google will make Gears available to run on the Opera browser.

Odd types out there using the Safari browser on the Windows platform will also have to wait for Google to rustle up support for that strange coupling. ®

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