What steps will reproduce the problem? 1.Install the latest seed of Snow Leopard with Safari 4 Beta 2.Install the latest Gears safari.
3.Restart safari.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead? Expected: Gears should work , Safari Menu should have Google Gears Safari in Safari menu.

Actual: Gears is listed in installed plugins, but does not show up in the menu.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? Platform: Mac OS X Version 10.6 (Build 10A286) - Snow Leopard Processor: 4 Intel 2.66 GHz RAM: 1024 MB

Gears: Gears version: 0.5.15.0

Installed Browsers: Safari: 4 Public Beta (6530.1)

Please provide any additional information below. No errors are reported in the console, gears.google.com does not show Gears installed after installing.

I want to clarify a couple things.

1. What happens when you go to http://gears.google.com? a) Does it show Gears as being installed? b) What version does it show?

2. What happens when you try to enable offline Gmail?

My quick reading of this bug is that the menu item for Gears is not showing up. That would be a bug but it would also be different than Gears not working at all.

1. If we go to gears.google.com it does not show any thing, attached is the screen shot of the same.

If we go to : http://code.google.com/apis/gears/samples/hello_world_database.html Following is the message : Could not create database: Result of expression 'google.gears.factory.create' [undefined] is not a function. Also click on the button for file picker does not work, Error using Geolocation API: Result of expression 'google.gears.factory.create' [undefined] is not a function. Could not create local server: Result of expression 'google.gears.factory.create' [undefined] is not a function. Could not create local server: Result of expression 'google.gears.factory.create' [undefined] is not a function.

2. If we Enable offline for Gmail, attached gmail screen is displayed. if suggested to install gears.

Gears won't even install with Snow Leopard. Trying this with Gears 0.5.22.0, the installer gives the following error:

Google Gears is not compatible with Mac OS X versions later than Leopard (10.5).

Deleting the Installation check from inside the Gears pkg file allows Gears to install on Snow Leopard and shows in Safari's Menu (Google Gears Settings) however no sites are listed, and I get the following error if using the Database Demo:

Could not create database: Result of expression 'google.gears.factory.create' [undefined] is not a function.

Safari 4.0.3 (6531.9), Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 Build 10A432

get message: "Google Gears is not compatible with Mac OS X versions later than Leopard (10.5)" BUMMER!!!

Snow Leopard and Safari 4 introduced some changes which are incompatible with Gears.
Apple made these changes to improve the security of their OS and of Safari. While we continue to talk to Apple about the issue there is no workaround for us at this time.

Gears continues to work with Firefox on Mac OS X.

Gears installer is completly incompatible with snow leopard : "Google Gears is not compatible with Mac OS X versions later than Leopard (10.5)".

Please raise the priority level, this is a showstopper for every SSB user.

Otherwise, push up Chrome for Mac OS X priority.

Code injection on OS X isn't limited to input managers — you can do it with http://rentzsch.com/mach_inject/ or scripting additions. Both of these solutions require additional daemon that will trigger the injection, but they seem to be working on Snow Leopard. Here's more information, with a possible solution that doesn't require additional daemons: http://code.google.com/p/safariblock/issues/detail?id=115#c16

32bit apps like Mailplane, Fluid, or 32bit Safari work fine with Google Gears under Snow Leopard. I removed the OSX version check and was able to use "Offline Gmail" without problems. However, I'm not sure if the "Snow Leopard" networking code is still 100% compatible with the current Google Gears implementation.

Please raise the priority level of this problem. If you didn't have gears installed before, or uninstalled it, there is no way to get gears running. The installer tells you "Google Gears is not compatible with Mac OS X versions later than Leopard (10.5)" and cancels the installation. This is a show stopper. You cannot instal gears in firefox or safari.

As others have said, this is a completely show stopper if you are on Snow Leopard and didn't already have gears installed. Doesn't matter what browser you are running, Gears refuses to install.

No gmail offline mode for me, even running chrome.

Big sad face!

Just as a point of clarity. You can still use Gears with Firefox. Just not Safari. Can someone tell me how to get Chrome for OS X at all?

You can get OS X Chrome from the Developer channel at http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html? extra=devchannel. I'm using it with GlimmerBlocker on Snow Leopard, and it works nicely. Now it's just the Gears we're sorely missing.

It would be great if the google team can upgrade this to high priority. As per the message above, gear can NOT be installed on Leopard. Hence, it's not possible to use gears with any browser.

The mailplane guys have a modified version of Gears that works well for me. Using their hack, I'm again able to use offline GFYD mail in Safari 4.0.3 on Snow Leopard 10.6.1. Thanks guys!

http://mailplaneapp.com/download/google_gears/

Unfortunately what they are doing is forcing Safari to run as a 32 bit application instead of 64 bit. That is not something we could really force on all Gears users. In fact it is probably not something that MailPlane users will be very happy with long term.

To be clear the only changes they made to Gears was to remove the version checking.

Of course it's not for the long term. They say: "It's a workaround until an official solution is made available." I offered the link for those who want an immediate solution.

People who installed Google Gears before upgrading to Snow Leopard and use Firefox seem to not have problems but if one wants to install Gears from scratch in Firefox on Snow Leopard, the installer says that Gears cannot be installed on MacOS 10.6.

Would it not be possible to allow the installer to proceed anyway so that people who use Firefox can install Gears?

I clean installed Firefox and put gears on from there in 10.6 without a hitch. Runs perfect now =). The only thing i can think is maybe firefox grabbed the a previously install gears from safari (retarded I know but after going nuts trying to find why I could not install gears to FF on my work comp that was what turned out to be the prob [this was in 10.5 though. Just thought it might be a good approach]). Just go to tools->addons->plugins and see if there is a gears one hiding out.

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In my case this is not possible, as I installed snow leopard on a formatted disk. It will also be a problem for people who want to start using Gears but haven't used Gears before.

This terrible. My whole life is in Gmail offline. All my time on airplanes is where I catch up on mail. Now I can't do that!!! I have tried all posible workarounds and can't get it working with Safari or Firefox. Can't even install gears from Safari. The install page goes blank....

Found this site whilst trying to work out how to run offline gmail in mailplane within snow leopard.

The solution is to download the BETA version of mailplane (http://mailplaneapp.com/download/beta/)

And the Snow Leopard Google Gears from here:(http://mailplaneapp.com/download/google_gears/)

Then everything works just great. :)

This has been listed as a problem for most of the year, and a fix is still not forthcoming. According to the above post, this is a problem with Safari and not Gears itself per se. As Mac customers, I think if we want this issue to be fixed properly, we have to contact Apple directly (i.e. post on Apple's message boards).

I think if enough people ask Apple, or raise it as a concern, they won't be able to ignore their users' concerns forever.

Who's with me? :-)

I've started a post here:

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=263

No, this is a Google problem. You're not going to get anything out of Apple. There are two issues: their plugin is not compatible with 64-bit safari yet (an issue shared with some other plugins out there), and their installer performs a version check disallowing installs on 10.6 regardless.

This was an OS change well signalled and available for testing over an unusually long beta period. It was as you say even reported by someone in that beta six months before release. (I guess Google engineers did not participate, and likely still aren't dogfooding their stuff on SL.)

That they still haven't released an official installer that works under 10.6, so you can at least run Safari in 32-bit mode (never mind install for Chrome) shows you this is not a current priority. (Apparently commenting on how little work this was for a third party is, though!)

To me at this point it is unwise to rely on gmail for offline mail, or on any of Google's Mac-related tools. (I got caught out by all of this while travelling for business, not fun.) It's clearly not a focus, and perhaps fair enough, though with their engineer count I would have naively expected better.

By the way, some of the confusion on this thread is because if you stick completely to Firefox under a from- scratch install of 10.6, you can install gears (for FF only), because it goes through the internal firefox add-on path. You can't install it using the downloadable installer however. Unless you use the mailplane rebuilt-without- version-check one above.

What's amazing to me is that other plugin developers have managed to figure out how to get their stuff going with the new architecture. SIMBL and SafariCookies are two that I use that at least have betas in the works. And while this isn't something I'm paying for, it does give me some insight as to how Google prioritizes their development efforts and some cause for thought as to whether I want to move business-related functions, some of which I would or do pay for with other vendors.

As a Firefox user, this particular issue isn't killing me, but I have to wonder if this is representative of Google's approach to the Apple and OSX world.

The fact that this is a medium priority defect is insulting.

What's even more interesting is that Google Chrome is now available on the Mac, albeit as a "pre-beta" Developer preview, but Google Gears doesn't even work in Google Chrome since the installer still refuses to go on Snow Leopard.

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I would like to know what Google is doing to solve this issue. Gears is a important plugin to a lot of people, especially because of Google Services like the Offline versions of Gmail, Docs and Reader.

Users of Safari on Snow Leopard also cannot use the “My Location” feature on Google Maps, the “drag-and-drop” of content from the desktop inside a Wave in Google Wave, and so on. Why Google is not letting us know when we’ll be able to get a version of Gears that work on Safari 4 for Snow Leopard?

If Gears can be converted into the 64-bit environment, at least try to provide alternatives to it. Safari has the HTML 5 specs for App Cache and Database: is not possible to adapt the Offline web apps to use this technology natively?

"If Gears can be converted into the 64-bit environment..."

This is simply not the case, as Mailplane is already building a 64-bit version of Gears. The lack of progress, or even response, from Google on this issue is very, very strange.

"Mailplane is already building a 64-bit version of Gears."

Really? Their site says you need to do things like "restart Mailplane 2.1-beta or any other 32bit Browser like Fluid," and select Safari's "Open in 32-bit mode."

My apologies, Mailplane is not providing a 64-bit version of Gears, but there are several user-built 64-bit versions of Gears floating around the web.

Is there any word of a official 64bit version of Gears coming down the pipe to establish compatibility with Snow Leopard? I am astonished this is not a higher priority issue and/or that no progress has been made! I was pulling the trigger on a large Google Apps deployment when we ran into this issue! Firefox usage is a workaround but not a fix!

Does Google even read (care about) this thread?!

I'm yet another Google Apps user suffering from this problem.

I am wondering what the great deal is here. Google simply appears to not be interested. I wonder why... Well. Enemy number one being Microsoft, of course development first goes into that platform.

Some people said there are some user-built 64-bit versions of Gears around on the web. Any experience with that? As far as Mailplane / Fluid versions concern, as I understood, these are not 64-bit because Mailplane / Fluid both are not 64-bit applicatoins but rather modified 32-bit versions.

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Why has nobody suggested using SIMBL? I notice it was mentioned in passing as one project that survived the death of InputManagers, but instead of duplicating their solution (and having yet another daemon running in the background to do the same thing), I suggest reworking Gears for Safari as a SIMBL plugin. It may be the case that nothing even needs to be changed, provided it compiles and functions correctly as a 64-bit binary.

In fact, tomorrow I am going to have a go at it. Checking out the source as we speak.

It is annoying that 1password solved this problem over two months ago1 and google's team has not done anything to fix it. SIMBL's implementation uses this approach. I would love to help in the effort to get this working but I have neither the experience or the time. Google Gears has become rather important with the introduction of Wave, and with an official version of Chrome lacking, it would be nice if 64-bit Safari 4 were supported.

Why is this still Medium? This makes drag and drop for google wave unusable in OSX.

"Why is this still Medium? This makes drag and drop for Google wave unusable in OS X."

And not just that: You cannot drag waves from the main panel to folders on the sidebar as well. Instead of drag the Wave, Safari selects the text on the item who represents it. This is very weird compared to the behavior of other browsers.

But we're not here to talk Wave only, we're here to talk about Gears. And I can't believe that nobody on Google can respond this thread with some explanation about the progress of the 64-bit compatible version for the Safari 4 on Mac.

Stupid Google just wants to force us to Chrome when it comes out next month....

One more complaint.... Either you guys port this to Snow Leopard or People will start relying on HTML5 DB's on WebKit and Gecko based browsers to develop web-apps as Gears is clearly not working at all on Snow Leopard ( Mail Plane thing is a dumb-fix and shall not even be considered ). MILLIONS of Mac Users around the world are being directly affected by this lack of consideration and people are suffering without any GMail Offline, Docs Offline, Advanced Wave features and a bunch of other features on services that Google and other people who used Gears for developing their web-apps are offering. Please reconsider the Priority of this bug based on the FACT that more than 80% people already did the migration to Snow Leopard, and we're talking here of the whole Mac Users population which is a ever-growing platform.

Well, I never did get Gears to build. Didn't feel like tracking down a thousand (literally a thousand) compiler errors and a bunch of missing source files to maybe get it running. After looking at what the InputManager is doing, though, I am convinced that it would work perfectly fine as a SIMBL plugin if only I could get it to build.

Anyway, I'm unwatching this issue. My inbox is getting flooded with a lot of self-important whining. I thought Linden Labs had it bad. People, verbally abusing Google's employees isn't going to get you shit.

@45: We are not supporting gears on Snow Leopard and later versions of Mac OS X. Relying on HTML5 database and appcache going forward is a good approach as a replacement for Gears on these platforms.

@47: Are there any comments from Google Docs Team and Wave Team about supporting HTML5 + appcache instead of using Gears ? at least for the Mac environment ?

@47: Are you speaking for Google? (as indicated by your @google.com email address?)

If so, do you mean that gears is not supported on Snow Leopard, or just not supported for 64-bit Safari 4 on Snow Leopard? In other words, can I expect support for using gears (for offline Gmail) with Firefox (or Mozilla Prism) on Snow Leopard?

Do you mean to say that Google is relying on HTML5 database and appcache going forward (as a replacement for gears in offline Gmail, Wave, G-Docs etc)? Or are you saying that other developers should use these instead of gears?

Thanks in advance for clarification, it has been frustrating waiting for a response from Google on this.

Something that hasn't come up yet that I think is a big deal…Gears doesn't work for CHROME either on 10.6! I do not know if this is because of Chrome's pre-release status, but I'm running the latest dev build and it still does not work!

I couldn't care less about Safari not working, it's buggy anyways. CHROME, however, needs to be compatible with Gears in 10.6.

@47: Are there any plans to update the Google Gears homepage, as it is currently misleading. At the moment the system requirements are listed as "Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3+ or Tiger 10.4.11+, G4+/Intel CPU" and "Gears is available for Windows, Windows Mobile (IE Mobile, Opera Mobile), Mac (Firefox, Safari), Linux and Android.", which is clearly incorrect as this defect as yet to be addressed, and Gears does not have support for Safari or Snow Leopard.

This issue must be fixed asap ! I had been using gears a lot, and since I upgraded to snow leopard everything stopped work. I'm starting to consider to use thunderbird as mail client, mas there are a lot of other applications which use gears, like google docs, calendar, etc.

Please consider this issue as extremely high priority !!! It's unacceptable an important issued like this one without its deserved attention. More than 2 months without a fix !!!!

Snow Leopard 10.6.2 Chromium build: 4.0.257.0 (33059) Version 4.0.4 (6531.21.10)

@47 Does this mean that Google will be moving towards standards-based offline storage and geolocation instead of their proprietary Gears stuff? I hope so, and I hope that this happens sooner rather than later, as I'd like to be able to use these features on your sites...

I can't imagine how this would be a 'medium' priority issue.

Please, raise the priority.

Please raise the priority. We're all moving to Snow Leopard.

Attention!

The severity of an issue is measured by how many people that have starred it. Whenever you post a comment here, an e-mail is sent to all the starrers. Many people will un-starr issues that gets a lot of comments. This is especially true when all the comments are about how severe the issue is. The starrers already agree with you about the severity, because they have starred it. This makes posting comments about severity counter productive: Google won't read it, starrers will, and your comment is more likely to cause people to un-starr it than it is making Google prioritize the issue.

So please, let this be the last comment for a while. Just starr the issue, and hope for the best. Pointing out the severity in comments is pointless.

Thought I'd post this bit of info from this article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/chrome-for-mac-features/

"Gears, which allows for offline web app functionality, is completely off the table as a Chrome for Mac feature right now, according to project lead Mike Pinkerton (he actually noted this back in July). Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac."

So it looks like Google is switching to HTML5 rather than gears for present and future mac development, hence the delay.

@57 I believe you are misinformed as to how Project Hosting works on Google Code, please see this support page for more information on the issue life-cycle and priority labeling. http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/IssueTracker#Concepts The priority of an issue is an editable label, and is not automatically assigned based on how many people have starred the issue--unless that is the manual process which the google gears folks have said they follow.

IMHO the only reason this is a Priority-Medium issue, is the fact that people haven't publicized the issue much. The reality appears to be that google could care less about their mac users, based on how much attention they appear to have given this issue. I've loved using google products for years, but to simply drop support for something in this fashion certainly makes me want to research other products in case google decides to drop support for other features/applications in project hosting or google apps.

@59, I think that 58 seems to have answered the big question for us, if his answer is indeed correct. Basically, Google isn't ditching us. But they aren't going to waste time on Gears for Mac because they are basically 'leapfrogging' to HTML 5 instead. As much as it stinks for us as Mac users, it doesn't make much sense for them to continue developing a technology that was only a temporary fix anyway and apparently is becoming obsolete. So, as is often unfortunately the case for Mac users, we must have some patience. Making our voice heard isn't going to get us Gears anytime soon because they aren't going to do it. But if this gets some attention, perhaps they will do what they can to speed along the HTML 5 solution.

@59: I am not misinformed, but I can see why you thought I was. I were speaking in terms of conventions, though - most project owners uses the number of stars on an issue to determine what should be deemed important.

As @58 points out, it seems that the reason for the severity isn't that Google doesn't care about Mac, it's because Google doesn't care about gears, to put it bluntly. Here's another link referencing the same source on google going towards HTML5 instead of Gears.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/11/google-gears.html

Longterm wise it surely makes sense to go this way for Google as well as for the user, but still, the way Google handles this issue is not the finest way. I hope there is something in the pipeline since the iPhone version of GMail is already making full use of HTML5 and offline storage. As a bad interim solution one can set the Safari User Agent to Mobile Safari to test and maybe use this feature once in a while... It is really weird that the full client lacks behind the iPhone version somehow.

@60: I'm certainly glad to hear that google is moving towards the new HTML 5 standard, and hope that the project moves quickly. Snow Leopard has been GA for more than 3 months now, and we've only just been informed what direction google is moving toward in regards to gears in Snow Leopard/Safari. Combine that with the developer preview of Snow Leopard which has been available since June, I would have assumed development would be further along, or we'd at least have been told of this sooner. Here's hoping we can get some traction on google apps offline functionality, regardless of the technology used to re- implement the feature.

@61: That would be the manual process I wasn't sure about ;) I really wish google would mark this defect's status as WontFix and update the gears homepage to accurately represent their stance. It seems as though this defect and all of the other gears/Snow Leopard issues that have been filed are simply being ignored.

Maybe exemplary: Saft extends Safari in any one of three ways, only one of which is limited to 32-bit. Screen shot at http://www.wuala.com/grahamperrin/public/2009/12/02/a/001.png

The embrace of HTML 5 is welcomed.

Parallel to that: if any developer is inclined to progress this issue 847, use of SIMBL may be most appropriate.

http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php

Folks, take a hint from Issue 335, and use the issue tracker to share workarounds, or patches. If your comment doesn't substantively help solve this issue, it doesn't belong here. This project has a mailing list, and that's the proper place for your hopes, your fears, your burning questions, and your idle ruminations.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but adding unproductive comments actually makes it less likely that this issue will be fixed. This is an open-source project. Yes, the committers are Googlers, but there's nothing stopping you from checking out the code and trying to fix this issue. In fact, someone started to do just that @40, but left @46 because of your "self-important whining." With the Gears Team seemingly focused on Windows-related issues, it's all the more important that issues like this one be attractive for outside developers to solve.

In the spirit of taking my own advice, I checked out the source and tried to build it. I agree with the earlier comments @40, @41, @46, and @64. Scripting Additions are the new Input Manager, and it's the way to go for injecting code into 64-bit processes.
Before I even started looking at the Input Manager code, however, I tried using Xcode to build the project. It didn't work, so I updated the Xcode project and submitted a patch in Issue 984.

It seems much more likely that the team that would fix this is more dedicated thr chrome osx browser, which, once GA, should have gears as part of it natively.

I would love to see this work for chrome and safari! Please, please raise the priority!

gears wont run on mac 10.6 .... biggggg!!!! problem please raise priority thanks !!

forget about gears! It is crutch for bad browsers. Do not support it, like google doesn't support others.

(not part of google).

The reason this is not done is because its a huge amount of work, that would be wasted anyway the second that gmail etc moves over to using HTML5 for offline support.

So, the real question is, when will gmail support offline via HTML5?

The more creative Google gets with their gmail the more we are going to see Apple Mail people switch over, particularly with the growth of smart phones. The issue of accessing your email when offline is very very important and could be the single issue that makes or breaks Mailplane for these customers. I was under the impression that offline access to email was not only easy but one of the major selling points of Mailplane.

Support on Chrome for Snow Leopard :-)

I just updated by browser but still do not have offline gmail support/other gears features on my Snow Leopard machine.

I was forced to upgrade to Snow Leopard because I had to buy a new MAC. Now I cannot use google docs offline. Maybe if we organize a boycott of google entirely for everyone who relies on offline access for school ro work google would take notice if their ad revenue drops.

Yea, please fix this.. I'm experiencing the same issues with Snow Leopard and newest Safari

quickly!!!!

Atlassian Confluence relies on Gears.

Seems strange this isn't resolved yet. It's become core functionality for me and many others. Bad user experience.

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