Google Gears for Flock

Update: Both Google Gears and Flock have been discontinued in the meantime. Flock may not be completely dead as the team announced that it is "working on something awesome". It has not revealed yet what this will be though or when we can expect an announcement to be made in this regard.

As far as Gears is concerned, the feature has been retired by Google and is no longer available. Some Google products, Chrome for instance, offer part of Gears functionality such as offline mode for some Google services. End

Last week I suggested you give the new Flock 1.2 a try, and I don’t know if any of you would have… but if you do use Flock then I’ve found one extremely handy extension.

Google Gears is one year old now, and although we haven’t seen a huge adoption across the web, it is extremely useful if you use any of the Google services likes Docs, Reader, Calendar and Gmail.

I’m finding myself using Docs increasingly over the last few weeks and I really need access to my files offline, unfortunately Google Gears is officially only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. I presumed the Firefox extension would work for Flock as it’s built on the Firefox code base, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Luckily a quick Google later and I found Martin over at capcloud discovered converting the Firefox Gears extensions into a Flock extension to be fairly simple:

Following the instructions that I found on the Google Gears Google Group, I repackaged Google Gears as a Flock extension. (The only other converted Gears extension that I found seems to be for OS X.)

You can install the extension by clicking here.

Once you have downloaded this simply use Flock to open the file and it should install just like a normal extension.

Martin only just updated this on April the 24th, so there should be no reason for it not to work.

Hope you find it useful!

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