Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

1. Store and serve application resources locally

2. Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database

3. Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

For its premier launch, it enabled Google Reader, Google’s RSS reader for offline mode.

It was …. ‘unimpressive’. The technology is impressive but enabling Google Reader is not. When I started reading RSS feeds, I started with a client RSS reader (Pluck). Then I moved on the BlogLines because I liked it being web-based.

A client based RSS reader has several advantages:

1. slow to download all the feeds (I collect a lot of  feeds)

2. takes up space on your hard disk. This is not really a big issue. It is more of an irritation of having some ‘junk’ accumulate on my PC over time.

3. disjoint – I like to click on links in a feed that takes me to another web site. An offline RSS reader cannot do that if I am offline. So if I can only half-read in an offline reader, why bother ?

Google Reader on Google Gears has all of the above disadvantages plus it downloads only 2000 articles.

Google Reader was not built for Google Gears.