Google >

was gears.google.com
http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.

There's no way in hell will I use something that grabs system access like this.

• 2011-03-11 it was thankfully abandoned.

I had already known of it, but WordPress has a mention of it in Tools > Tools in its control panel ( http://yourblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/tools.php) and said it would speed up surfing.

I never did like the idea of remotely storing scripts and images.  The web browser cache idea stopped being properly used by most browsers some time ago, and changing content means that the cache concept doesn't really work for most content.  On top of that, JavaScript never had any kind of local storage ability.

So I decided to check it out.  Wow, it's installed as a Firefox extension.  Win.

Well.. so far so good.

2009-05-10 ∞

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/562-is-google-gears-safe.html

I thought Firefox add-ons were explicitly banned from making any disk writes outside of their specific directory.

Once I saw that Gears could create a handy little desktop icon for me, I abandoned it completely. I don’t want some random extension to have access to read or write to my system like that. Ever.

Firefox I can mostly trust. Google I don’t.