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Google has some great web applications including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader, but sometimes you need to check or view something while offline. Whether you are on a long flight or sitting at a coffee shop and do not want to pay a small fortune for an hour of Wi-Fi, Google Gears is making your data more accessible by letting you take that content offline.

“It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone.”

Google Gears is an open source browser extension for IE and Firefox built off of AJAX that will allow you to view your online content offline. The content will be stored in a SQLite database that offers powerful search features and synchronizes data in the background. Gears will allow you to read messages from Gmail, edit documents in Google Docs and even browse your RSS feeds from Google Reader. Any changes or additions you make to your files while offline will immediately update once you get back online. Google Gears will work with IE on Windows or Firefox 1.5 or later on Mac, Linux or Windows and is currently available as Beta. Of course this is Google and we would not expect anything else.

Read [Google Gears]

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