Firefox helped redefine the rules of web standard compliance when it first came out, fighting a David and Goliath battle against IE 6 then. It has come a long way now, and is the second browser in market dominance today.

Firefox 3.5 was released recently, promising double the processing speeds of Firefox 3.

I breezed through the upgrade process and hastily tried navigating around in Gmail. Decidedly faster.

Then, I realized the Offline Gmail feature was not working. I figured I needed to reinstall and resync the whole thing again, so I tried downloading Google Gears. That’s when I bumped into an error message and after Googling it up, I realized Google Gears has not been released for Firefox 3.5

This means users who rely on Google Gears (eg GMail Offline and Wordpress) are left in the dark. People have been complaining on message boards but somehow Google has yet to release an update for Google Gears on Firefox 3.5.

The Solution:  Geza Kovacs from MIT has released his own plugin for Firefox 3.5 which works perfectly well! If he could build it, I’m sure Google could have too. Perhaps they are trying to get people to switch over to their browser, Google Chrome. Anyway, Geza Kovacs’ solution is here : http://groups.google.com/group/gears-users/msg/70f164020c0f8f4e?pli=1

Just click on the appropriate link for your operating system, and you’re good to go!