Offline Gmail a no go for Mac users. Google Gears to blame…

Posted at 8:19 pm December 8, 2009 by

gmail-logoGoogle fanatics and Mac power users are experience a bad case of digital doldrums tonight. While starting the week off on a high with Gmail Offline support officially rolling out to everyone — and not relegated to a simple, option lab feature — many will be ending on a completely different plane. You see, in order for Gmail’s offline features to work, your browser needs to support Google Gears. Macs don’t do support Google Gears, but only through Firefox. Safari support is hit and miss. And Google Chrome is moving to HTML 5… But all is not lost — in the impending future anyway.

Google themselves came forward recently and announced that they were abandoning Gears and instead putting the majority of their developing muscle behind HTML5. The biggest benefit of course being widespread and non-proprietary support as well as a close feature set to Gears with untapped potential for future innovations.

I could tell you happy tales of HTML 5 and open source development all day. But it won’t mask the cold hard reality that settles in when the glitz and glamor of “HTML 5″ wear off. The reality being that for the hear and now, Mac users are left in the dark when it comes to offline Gmail support. As of writing there isn’t a solution for Chrome/Gears use on Macs. But give it some time. I’m sure some crafty developer can whip something mighty tasty up. Though I’m sure you would just as easily be pleased if Google hopped to it and whipped up some offline Gmail support via HTML 5.

Of course there is that one small problem of HTML 5 not actually being a standard yet….

Cnet

   
  • Wilco Moerman

    Hi, I had the same problem with Snow Leopar, Chrome and gears. I installed the gears version that Mailplane compiled, and I used Fluid to make a standalone app for gmail ("https://mail.google.com/&quot ;) . It now resides in my dock as an app. This way I can use chrome as my default browser, and use gmail (on- and offline) as if it is an Mac OS app.

    a note: after I installed Fluid and tried offline support, it said my browser didn't support gears (I think fluid uses safari?) but when I tried it, the offline mail still works with Fluid (I assume it uses the Mailplane version).

    links:

    Mailplane site where they explain what they modified in the gears code and where you can download it: http://mailplaneapp.com/download/google_gears/
    Fluid (turn your favorite websites in standalone apps): http://www.fluidapp.com/

    Hope this helps?

    • Mike

      Wow, a lot more involved than it should be. But thanks a million for the tip!

  • Wes

    Huh? Gears works just fine in Firefox on the Mac. And in Safari, although I get weirdly inconsistent messages about it not being support, once install, it works fine. (…on Tiger and Leopard; apparently there’s a bug that’s stopping it from working right on Snow Leopard, but Google is fixing that.)

    The recently launched Google Chrome for Mac beta, ironically, does not integrate Gears support. But Gears was always just a stop-gap solution for features that HTML5 has standardized. (… features that the latest versions of all the major browsers pretty much already support)

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