Google Gears arrives for Safari

Users of Google tools such as Docs, Reader, and Picasa can now ditch the Windows and enjoy their tools on a Mac. Until now, Gears was available for Firefox or IE on Windows only, but today Google announced the availability of Gears for Safari. A Mac running OS X 10.4.11 with Safari 3.1.1 (or higher, including Leopard) is required.

So what makes Gears so important? It exists mainly in the background and never really gets any direct interaction from the user—deceptively simple, in fact, but fundamentally important for enabling Web 2.0 applications.