offline plugin | un-mundane idiosyncrasies

A couple of months ago, I switched from Firefox to Google Chrome because the fox is eating a lot of memory. And to free that up, I have to quit Firefox with all the opened tabs (unlike in Chrome) and just run it again, which is pretty annoying if you have a lot of tabs opened.

So, I decided to switch to Google Chrome. Then, I found out that Google Chrome for Linux doesn’t support Gmail’s Offline feature, one feature that I really find quite handy. Still, I stayed with Chrome, hoping for the best that eventually, Offline will be supported in the next releases. Ironic that Gmail Offline is not supported in Google Chrome…

After months of hoping and waiting… still no Gmail Offline support. *sigh*

I decided to switch back to Firefox. The last time I installed Google Gears, it’s not supported yet in 64-bit, that’s why I looked for ways on how to do it. I was using Ubuntu 9.04 back then. Since I already upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, I figured that I’ll just have to retrace the steps that I did back then.

Apparently, I don’t have to. Google Gears installs fine in 64-bit nowadays 🙂

I used Gmail a lot. I like it’s simple and fast user interface. Aside from that, its plug-ins (Gmail Labs) are quite useful. One of the plug-ins that I really like is Offline. It gives me access to my old emails when there’s no internet connection available, using same Gmail’s interface.

This plug-in requires Google Gears, which can be easily installed as a Firefox add-on. The only problem is, only a 32-bit version is available in Firefox’s add-on list. Since I upgraded my work station to a 64-bit version of Ubuntu months ago, I can’t install Google Gears, which in turn, I can’t enable Offline in Gmail Labs… Anyway, not using Offline is no big deal so I let it pass.

I was organizing my mails today and I was, somehow, reminded about Offline, and I figured, “Maybe there’s a 64-bit version of Google Gears now”… Well, no. It’s not supported officially yet. After a little googling, I found this blog [blog.celogeek.com] . This guy has steps on how to compile Google Gears. He’s even kind enough to upload the binaries 🙂

By the way, I am using a Firefox 3.5.5pre…