The blogosphere is already lit up with posts about Google Gears and for good reason. Solving the offline/local-storage problem for web applications has been a hot topic -- it's one of those glaring voids in the web stack that keeps web applications from replacing desktop applications completely.
So what is Google Gears? It's an Open Source browser plugin that provides services (via JavaScript) for offline storage, data recovery, and synchronization. And here's the best part: it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows... on Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+ (with Safari support in development.) With such a huge support base, combined with the benefit of being a cross-browser solution and being open source, Gears has the right ingredients to become a defacto solution for offline web applications.
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