They said it would happen and it did. Anyone notice? If you didn’t happen to have Firefox 3.0 “Gears Enabled” then there was nothing to notice. If you did have Google Gears installed and you updated to Firefox 3.0.1 yesterday—you probably still didn’t noticed. It was done that quietly.
You see, the previous version of Google Gears (0.3.24) was actually the only version available as of the day before the update to 3.0.1 came out and that Gears version did not work with the new Firefox update while the new version of Gears (0.3.24.3), although currently being worked on, wasn’t slated to be out for awhile yet. However Google, on being informed of the early update to Firefox, increased the work on the next version of Gears and managed to push it out alongside the the release of Firefox 3.0.1. When a user of a “Gears Enabled” Firefox updated to 3.0.1 it quietly triggered the update to Gears as well.
So Firefox users who already had Google Reader “Geared up” as well as WordPress bloggers who used Firefox as a main browser (a lot of them I’d imagine) that looked forward to having a Gears enabled WordPress 2.6 Admin had no surprises coming when they updated their browsers.
It’s a rare occurrence indeed when two updates to two rather major pieces of software hit the streets within two days of each other where both rely on another smaller piece of software to enable a new major feature for so many users. Good on ya’ Google.
So did you notice anything? If you had Gears before you updated, most likely you didn’t.
Tags: Firefox 3, google gears, wordpress 2.6
Well I have the latest version of FF and word press and have no idea what google gears does or if I even have it?
Hi Elaine,
Welcome to the new site.
I’m sure you don’t have it but WordPress 2.6 is now enabled to use Gears to speed up the loading of your WordPress Admin pages. It stores most of everything that makes the Admin function onto your computer and loads the Admin using that instead of yanking it off your server. This was especially included in 2.6 for those who are stuck with relatively slow connections and to take a bit of the load off a shared server (like Bluehost and many others). Works slick.
In your Admin, look at the upper right of any page and you’ll see the “Turbo” button. That will start the process of installing Gears and downloading your Admin files if you want to give it a try. Once the install and download is complete, it works in the background…you’ll never know it’s there.