Reading some of the comments there is some confusion about whether this allows an offline mode of WordPress and also about the privacy of using this Google browser add-on.

People wonder if Gears will allow them to use the WordPress Dashboard to write posts while offline. We’re not quite there yet. Gears for WordPress 2.6 (coming soon!) uses Gear’s LocalServer API which basically is a persistent, smart cache allowing the static files to always be loaded from your local computer — turbo!

That takes me to the second concern I see in the blog posts and comments about this feature, specifically on the Weblog Tools Collection post. Some people are really concerned with the privacy of Gears. Understandably, they are leery of providing Google even more personal data. Gears isn’t a web service. It only talks to the mother ship to check for updates, unless you allow anonymous usage statistics:

• Your copy of Gears includes a unique application number. The unique application number and information about your installation of Gears (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when Gears automatically checks for updates.
• If you choose to enable Usage Statistics for Gears, it allows Gears to send crash reports and to collect a limited amount of non-personal information about your use of Gears and send it to Google.
• If you use Gears for Mobile, we may collect certain information such as your device and hardware IDs and device type, the browser type, the request type, your carrier, your carrier user ID, and the content of your request, which does not by itself identify you to Google, though it may be unique or consist of or contain information that you consider personal.

If you still are concerned about the privacy of Gears, here are two more reasons to have confidence: open source and Brad Neuberg. Gears is open source. This means that anyone can pop the hood and scrutinize the code — and people do. A very highly regarded open source developer Brad Neuberg is very involved in Gears. He is a leader in web development, open source, and collaborative development. He’s a person that I admire greatly, and trust through associations.

Wrapping this up. There is no WordPress dependency on Gears. It’s an optional browser plugin that can make for a faster experience. If you choose to use it, you should feel confident your privacy is respected.

Monday Update: Jeremy Bicha asks an astute question, why WordPress warns not to use on public or shared computers. The answer is that in a future version of WordPress we want to allow you to write and edit posts, and maybe even manage your blog without being connected to the Internet. That’s why Andrew decided (and I agree) it is better to warn against public/shared computers from the beginning.

Very soon we will release WordPress 2.5, and about the same time WordPress.com will be updated.

With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.

Supporting WordPressing is explicitly discussed in Surfin’ Safari Ten New Things in WebKit 3: “1. Enhanced Rich Text Editing”, “We now have support from web applications like WordPress…”.

But that is only half of story. With WordPress 2.5, we have upgraded WordPress’s visual editor to the much anticipated TinyMCE 3 — yes, 3 is very auspicious number.

The TinyMCE team only released TinyMCE 3 in the last month. This is the first release with full support for Safari (3). Thanks to Andrew Ozz’s generosity, with the support of Johan Spocke Sörlin and the rest of the TinyMCE team, we were quickly able to integrate it into WordPress 2.5 and fix problems as they have been identified.

The dreaded bug where all of your paragraphs would become one continuous jumble of text has been fixed.

If anything about the development version of WordPress (soon to be released as WordPress 2.5) isn’t working well with Safari 3, it’s now open season on reporting the bugs to us at WordPress, and we can work on figuring if they are ours, Moxiecode’s, or Apple’s.

As my friends know, when on Windows, I’ve been enthusiastically using Safari on Windows as my secondary browser since August.

The secretive Apple Corporation is not known for having dialogs with its customers — it is known for letting its products do the talking. Nor is Apple known for being an open source participant — the parts of its systems that are open source, and often shared with a, “Here’s the source, do what you want with it. No, we won’t tell you what’s coming next.”

Surfin’ Safari, with its great content, discussions continuing in the comments, and developer community participation seems to show a different, and much appreciated by me, side of Apple. But any questions about future Apple will go unanswered, like when will Safari for Windows be updated next or released?

Surfin’ Safari wasn’t always powered by WordPress, but it has always been powered by browser building legend David Hyatt and his ability to keep us all updated and interested.