Google Gears makes it possible to take web applications offline, but so far only few applications have adapted this technology. Ben Lisbakken has come up with a great idea called GearsMonkey which uses Google Gears and Greasemonkey to implement Google Gears on third party sites. This means third party developers can code Greasemonkey scripts which integrate Gears into websites which haven’t done it already. Here’s what the creator of GearsMonkey says:
"Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there’s altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don’t wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters’ precious bandwidth/server power!
But alas, if only it were a reality that every site was Gears enabled — the internet faster and available anywhere. You’d need every site to implement Gears — GearsMonkey to the rescue!"
As an example, he has built a greasemonkey script which implements Google Gears on Wikipedia. Once you’ve installed Greasemonkey and Google Gears, you need to install this script. Now, you can save every Wikipedia article by clicking on "cache page". This video demonstrates how it works:
This is totally awesome because we no longer have to wait for the webmaster to implement Gears on his site, – we can do it ourselves! Wikipedia was just the beginning; you can expect loads of other websites to be integrated with Gears.
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