CODEWITHSUNDEEP
osx-snow-leopardgears
Vincent
Vincent

Reputation: 630

Installing Gears in 2012

For one of the customers of my company, I have to get Gears working. To explain briefly, they have a site using the Gears local database and now want to really use localStorage (at least for browsers supporting it and still use Gears for the old ones).

To refactor the code and ensure that the HTML5 version works as the Gears version used to work (and that I do not break the existing system is also a plus). And here comes the problem: Gears is not supported anymore and seems unable to install.

My dev' machine is using OSX Snow leopard. I tried the Gears custom installer made by the authors of MailPlane (http://mailplaneapp.com/download/google_gears/) to enable gears on Safari. The installer runs without any issue and I have a "Google Gears settings" entry in Safari's menu. But the code does not work, here's the console output for the database creation code:

> google.gears.factory.create('beta.desktop')
Error
line: 2
message: "'undefined' is not a function (evaluating 'google.gears.factory.create('beta.desktop')')"
sourceId: 419639712
__proto__: Error

(this is the code I got from the customer).

In the console, when I try accessing the Gears factory, I just get a simple html object:

> google.gears.factory
<object style=​"display:​ none;​ " width=​"0" height=​"0" type=​"application/​x-googlegears"></object>​

In Gears preferencies, there's a site of sites for which I can allow Gears to run, but I can't add localhost there (I can't add anything in fact).

As I can't get Safari/Gears working, I decided to setup a WinXP virtual machine, maybe it would work here. I was able to download the Gears installer. But this one needs file that have been removed from Google servers (at least I guess, but I don't have any firewall installed so I don't see what could block the installer when getting the files ...).

I also tried old Chrome installers (apparently Gears was shipped in Chrome 12-) but none of the installers work (they just, well, do nothing. I even tried to start them from the command line to expect a bit of output but I got nothing).

Another option would be to get a Firefox gears add-on, but they all seem to have disappeared :/

So, the question (finally): does anyone here still have to use Gears and how do you get it running on new machines ?

Cheers, Vincent

Upvotes: 0

Views: 427

Answers (1)

Jigar Pandya
Jigar Pandya

Reputation: 5987

I think The Google Gears API is no longer available.

Please see https://developers.google.com/gears/ page.

Thanks, Jigar

Upvotes: 0

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