Google engineers have enabled what Internet surfers for years have yearned for--Web applications that work offline.
The search giant on Wednesday launched Google Gears, a browser plug-in that will let people run Web applications when they're connected to the Internet or not.
The goal of Google Gears is to create a single, standardized way to add offline capabilities to Web applications, said Linus Upson, engineering director at Google.
The initial code is aimed at JavaScript developers who write Ajax-style Web applications. It runs on Internet Explorer on Windows; Firefox on Windows, Mac OS and Linux; and on the Safari Mac OS browser.
Google expects to have a consumer-ready release of Google Gears, which will be under 1 megabyte in size, "within months." It also expects to submit the code to a standards body so that it will eventually be built into all standards-compliant browsers, Upson said.
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