02 Sep 2009 by Ruben

Snow Leopard and Google Gears


Google Gears

Are you using Mailplane 2.1-beta with Google Gears to get your Gmail offline? Unfortunately, Google Gears for Safari doesn't work with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. There's no official statement, but I found this comment at the end of Google Gears Issue 847:

Snow Leopard and Safari 4 introduced some changes which are incompatible with Gears. Apple made these changes to improve the security of their OS and of Safari. While we continue to talk to Apple about the issue there is no workaround for us at this time.

Gears continues to work with Firefox on Mac OS X.

The problem seems to the new 64bit Safari version. It doesn't load any InputManagers like Google Gears.

However: Mailplane, Fluid, or even 32bit Safari would still be capable of loading Google Gears, even under Snow Leopard.

I went ahead and tried it:

  • Checked out the Google Gears code
  • Removed the OSX version check
  • Built the thing
  • Installed the resulting Google Gears

Bingo! My "Offline Gmail" inside Mailplane 2.1-beta is back! I tried Fluid and 32bit Safari too: Both worked as expected.

A few questions remain: Is the networking code for Snow Leopard still the same? Are there any Snow Leopard related bugs? Will Google offer a solution soon?