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.

Three months ago, Yahoo acquired the rights to the popular Safari search extension, Inquisitor, from David Watanabe. Today, version 3.2 of the software was launched, bringing numerous Yahoo touches to the whole package. Most notably, search results are built around Yahoo’s