How to run the Google Gears extension on Firefox 4?

Question

I am running Firefox 4 beta for testing, and unfortunately Google hasn't updated their Gears extension for Firefox 4. At this point, it even seems that Google might not update Gears for Firefox 4. Do you guys know of any trick to get Gears to run on Firefox 4?

(For reference, here is where you can download the OS X XPI for Gears.)

Answer 1

Google have explicitly deprecated Gears; they no longer support it (as of about a year ago!).

They have switched to focus on HTML5 and other related new browser features. In effect they're saying that all the functionality provided by Gears can be done using HTML5.

Here's a link to an article about them dropping it (but there's plenty of others if you google for it):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/11/google-gears.html

The down-side is that not all browsers do support all the HTML5 features that are needed to replicate the Gears functionality, so by deprecating it they've cut off support for some browsers. Chrome is fine, of course! But the other browsers are catching up - certainly Firefox 4 should be fine.

Answer 2

A lot of the functionality provided by google-gears is becoming part of html5 - firefox has implemented local storage since 3.5.

Modernizr provides api detection - but not abstraction - I imagine there may be some out there on the internet (Google Gears / HTML5 has only recently appeared on my radar). So far I've not found any way for an html5 app to create a desktop shortcut though.

Update:

See also:

http://www.phonegap.com/

https://github.com/zefhemel/persistencejs

http://code.google.com/p/webstorageportabilitylayer/