As I’ve mentioned before, web apps are a part of many people’s every day computing. Offline access is neglected by this behavior. Google Gears aims to provide offline access and improved javascript performance. The preview release previously mentioned wasn’t intended for end user use.
Google has finally released Google Gears for Safari on Mac OS X for all. All those great Google Gear enabled sites become your oyster. Zoho office, WordPress, the new YouTube uploader and Google Docs offline are yours to use when you see fit.
While I’d like to see a non-Crossover version of Google Chrome, Google Gears is a technology that’s more useful and necessary to our platform at this point. We’re not short on functional browsers, but we are short on offline web computing technologies.
I’m a bit old school in that I prefer locally hosted applications, but what web apps would you like offline access to? I’m not even going to bother commenting on whether it’s beta or not because that distinction seems to carry no significance with Google.
"The Cloud" used to be referred to as "The Mainframe". The personal computer came about so that your files and 'stuff' were always available and you were not at the mercy of some big corporation. I would not trust anything with Google, especially with their BS 'Do no evil' line.