Google gears

Google is now using gears with its rss reader. Google gears extends the browser allowing to use the web applications offline. Which is wonderful. At the moment only Google Reader supports the offline mode and Google Gears is only available for Firefox and IE, but I hope that in the future more applications and browsers will be supported.

When you go offline, that happens is that Gears download what it supposes you need to use the web app offline. Then, the data it has downloaded are available. If anything was modified, Gears should automatically synchronize with the web app.

No configuration is needed (even if it would had been nice to have something to tune).

As a first step, it's not bad, but in order to make the web apps as usable as the regular web apps, something more is needed:

1. Support to any application
2. Complete control on what is download and how
3. Some more transparency. At the moment I have to decide if I want to go offline or not. It would be wonderful if Gears automatically went somehow offline and automatically synced, so that a down of the network would not affect my surfing.