Google Reader Now Available Offline

By Ben Gross
in

At the recent Google Developer day, Google released offline functionality for Google Reader, it’s browser based feed aggregator. The offline functionality is enabled by Google Gears which “is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality[.]” It’s an interesting technology that I’ll write more about at a later date.

You can install the Gears extension directly from a link on the Google Reader site. Once installed you can download the last 2000 messages into your browser for offline use. Embedded content such as YouTube videos are not available offline. Data is stored in the integrate SQLite database. Syncing is currently manual, but hopefully it will move to a background process. While the technology is still very new, existing users of Google Reader who wish to have access to their feeds offline will likely find this compelling. Gears is cross platform and cross browser. It is available for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Early adopters who use Safari with nightly builds of WebKit can also work with Gears.

Published June 7, 2007