I've received notification that my re-zipping of the Gears for Win32 binaries has been moved from Experimental to Public status. Read on for more details on how it works, or if you're in a hurry you can get it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13492
Notes:
* If you have installed a version of Gears that has been "hacked into place" via various methods mentioned on these forums and elsewhere, you should finally be able to get an automatic update to 0.5.36.0 with Tools -> Add-ons -> Find Updates. (This is possible because the official Gears binaries do not specify a third-party update URL; thus Firefox automatically checks addons.mozilla.org instead.)
* If installed from addons.mozilla.org, Gears will install into your personal Firefox profile rather than system-wide. This means you can install it as non-Administrator, and without the GoogleUpdate.exe background process if desired.
* Because the add-on is intentionally unchanged from Google's own distributed binaries, it will install with the same GUID and same name (that is, it will say "Google Gears" in your add-on list). The way to tell if the Portable version is installed is easy: if the Uninstall button is *not* greyed out, then the Portable version is installed in your user profile.
John, as with Sage etc., you're welcome to create a link-through page to this add-on as part of the PortableApps.com application listings.
Excuse my ignorance but I thought Google Gears was being phased out in favour of a HTML5 solution. Is this so? If so is there value in maintaining Gears?
PortableApps.com Advocate
It's still being used though and will be for quite some time. The fact that it's not being developed won't stop people using it for a long time, as it provides offline support (and other things) for browsers which don't support the HTML5 spec.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1