Firefox 3 and Google Gears
June 17, 2008 – 8:58 pmFirefox 3 came out today. If you don’t use Firefox, you should give it a try. Why? Apparently it’s supposed to be up to 7 times faster than Internet Explorer. And if you do have Firefox 2, you should upgrade – this is supposed to be ~3 times faster. Learn about it and download it at getfirefox.com.
To go along with that, you should install Google Gears. Gears lets you run certain web applications offline – most importantly Google Docs! Now you can have all of your Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations available and editable from anywhere. You could probably live without MS Office or OpenOffice installed now. Other significant Gears-enabled apps include Google Reader (an RSS reader) and Remember The Milk (a todo list application with a gmail plugin) – I use both and find both very helpful.
If you have any questions or need any help, let me know.
-Ben
4 Responses to “Firefox 3 and Google Gears”
uh…i don’t know, doesn’t firefox 3 support offline web apps, which kinda renders google gears obsolete?
By crystal on Jun 17, 2008
FF3 includes the beginnings of HTML5 support, which includes built-in support for offline web apps. You can read about it here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Offline_resources_in_Firefox
Problem: nobody uses this yet. They all use Gears. So until people recode their sites to work with this, we’ll be using Gears.
By Ben on Jun 17, 2008
I love it!
By Ray Li on Jun 19, 2008
Whoa – Crystal must be some sort of tech ninja; I didn’t even know about that. FF3 broke my gestures plug-in, boooo. It is noticeably faster. As for gears, I’m gonna stick with M$ Office for now until google docs can open any of my work templates…
By David on Jun 20, 2008