Google Gears is a clever technology that allows social media applications like Google Reader, WordPress, and Remember the Milk to work offline in a browser, no Internet connection required. Gears has been around in the form of a Firefox plug-in for some time now, but the search giant just posted a beta that brings this functionality to Safari.

Quietly announced in a Google Groups post (free Google Account required), Google wants to make sure that guinea pigs potential users understand that this is a "BETA" (Google's caps, not ours), as if a Google product has ever been released as anything else.

Once installed, you should be able to visit any Gears-compatible site (which Google unfortunately doesn't keep a running list of) and click its "Offline" option to, well, go offline. Each site offers different offline functionality, but with Google Reader, for example, going offline will download the most recent batch of headlines and the associated content for all your subscribed feeds. At Remember the Milk, a popular web-based and Getting Things Done-inspired task management service, you'll be able to take your tasks with you, as well as create and manage tasks (though obviously not e-mail them to friends or coworkers). The popular web-based blogging and CMS software WordPress also incorporated support for Gears in a recent 2.6 release, which facilitates both offline blogging and a zippier UI experience altogether.





A Gears dialog you'll see when visiting a compatible site



As Google Operating System notes, the list of Gears for Safari issues includes a hint that offline Gears access for Gmail may soon be possible. While this feature has been talked about almost as long as Gears has existed, it's nice to see another hint that it's coming.

Users running at least Safari 3.1.1 on Tiger 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.3 can grab the Gears for Safari beta (direct .DMG link), but we'd like to echo Google's warning of the perils of beta. It's usually easy or even trivial to test beta software on the desktop due to the ease of backing up or simply duplicating Application Support folders and other crucial data, but many of these Gears-compatible web services don't offer any kind of fail-safe mechanism that you can control. While there's very little chance that Gears for Safari could bug out and mark all your RtM tasks as complete, do remember that "beta" truly means "it could very well break and cause your Mac to collapse into its own iBlack hole: beta." Even in Google's world.