Developer build of Gears 0.5.25.0 available for Firefox 3.5

As some of you may have already heard, users who depended on Google Gears enabled sites that upgraded to the newly released Firefox 3.5 earlier this month found themselves in a very unhappy situation–no Gears support yet. Not only that but there wasn’t a single developer build of Gears (upcoming version number 0.5.25.0) that the many testers of the pre-release builds of Firefox 3.5 (called Shiretoko) could check out for any possible bugs. Strange as it might sound, this is not an unusual occurrence when it comes to Gears support for Firefox. The same thing happened when Firefox 3.0 hit the streets last year. Gears support arrived approximately a week later.

The explanation behind the lack of support of Gears for testing pre-release builds of Firefox which, theoretically at least, would have paved the way for the immediate support of the new version once it became available, is that an entirely new build of Gears has to take place every time a new beta/RC build of Firefox comes available hence the lack of (public?) availability.

Hmmm, whatever.

However, for those of you that have been waiting patiently or not-so patiently for Gears support in Firefox 3.5 and who don’t mind testing out pre-release type software, the wait is over. A member of the Gears Users Google Group by the name of Geza Kovacs took the time to to put together 3.5 compatible Gears builds for Windows, Linux i386 and Linux x386_64 operating systems. Like any Add-on for Firefox these new Gears builds come as a “.xpi” file that installs just by clicking on the link. The download links are below:

Note: Clicking on the link will install the “.xpi” directly like any Firefox Add-on. Right-click and choose “Save link as” if you wish to download a copy of the file itself.

Windows:
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-win32-opt-0.5.25.0.xpi
Linux i386:
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-linux-0.5.25.0.xpi
Linux x86_64: 
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-linux-x86_64-0.5.25.0.xpi

Understanding that the above builds are developer’s builds and not official releases, make sure your comfortable with testing pre-release software before trying them out. For what it’s worth, I installed the Windows version as soon as I saw it available on the Gears Users Group and I haven’t experienced a single problem with it. All my Gears enabled sites have worked fine once I downloaded each site’s files into the Gears’ cache including the WordPress Admins for this site and my personal blog. And from what I’ve read on the above Group, no one else has encountered a problem using these builds either. From my experience using the Windows version the build has been rock stable. Thanks Geza!