Gears, an open source project that enables more powerful web applications by adding new features to web browsers, has recently been released for Safari, confirming rumors that Safari might eventually borrow features from Chrome. The plug-in extends the browser to create a richer platform for web applications. You can download the installer package right here on Softpedia.

Webmasters, for instance, can use Gears on their websites to let users access information offline or to provide them with content based on their geographical location. Gears was designed to be used on both Google and non-Google sites. Some web apps already make use of Gears, including two Google products. “We're really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X,” reads a post on the Google Mac Blog.

Gears modules include:

LocalServer – Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally;
Database – Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database;
WorkerPool – Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously.

In order to access information offline, you will first need to know where your data is saved. For Firefox, files are stored in the user local profile directory, according to Google. Example: Users/Bob/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/08ywpi3q.default/Google Gears for Firefox. For Safari, files are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Google Gears for Safari. Using Gears, you can also access all the Gears-enabled sites (such as Zoho office, WordPress, the new YouTube uploader and Google Docs offline) in Safari.

“Since launch, we've increased the number of APIs available in Gears. The 0.3 release added the ability to create desktop shortcuts for websites, and the 0.4 release added Geolocation and Blobs (useful for resumable uploads of large files),” says the Google Mac team. “All of these are now available in Safari and work exactly the same as on the other browsers Gears supports. We thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the technical aspects of Gears peculiar to Safari and OS X,” the Google Mac Blog reveals.

A good couple of hundred words found in the same report are aimed at developers. If that's you, have a look-see. If this is everything you wanted to know, Gears for Safari can be downloaded for free here. Minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11. You can help the Google Mac team improve Gears by sending crash reports and anonymous usage data.