Google Gears has been enabled on WordPress.com for a couple of weeks now for some members, but was only announced this week. Andrew Ozz (azaozz) added this feature a couple of month ago in the development version of self-hosted WordPress. I’ve been using it for about a month, and even though I have a decent internet connection (15156 kbps measured), I really notice how quick Gears makes the visual editor’s Insert Link popup pop. Over all, it feels a little quicker.
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.
10 Comments
Your blog post didn’t answer the other question about WordPress Turbo privacy. WordPress has a warning about “don’t enable Turbo on a public computer.” What private information is potentially being cached?
Thanks for the kind comment! I’m excited about the work WordPress is doing with Gears. I just shot off an email to Andrew Ozz, who did much of the work on the Gears integration, why it says not to use on a public computer. As far as I know it is just the admin interface’s UI resources, but perhaps some of the pages that it stores are personalized. I’ll follow-up on this when I get a response.
BTW, what kinds of things do you like to hack on?
Best,
Brad Neuberg
Gears
Jeremy, that’s an excellent question!
As you say, WordPress warns you not to turn Gears on if on a public computer: “However, if this is a public or shared computer, Gears should not be enabled.”
Currently, Gears only stores public files, but 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. Then when you connect to the Internet, your blog gets the updates.
There are no fine grain controls in Gears, so when we add those features Gears won’t ask you for permission to store this private data. That’s why Andrew decided (and I agree) it is better to warn against public/shared computers from the beginning.
I just heard back from Andrew on why they say that in the dialog and was about to post, but it looks like Lloyd beat me to it
Best,
Brad
Thank you very much for your prompt answer. That makes a lot of sense, more sense than letting users get used to a feature that “suddenly” would change to caching private data.
This being the most informative source on the whole wordpress-gears subject: is there any news on the offline usage front? While I am subscribed to WP-testers, I generally don’t have the time to wade through the sheer number of mails, so I’m completely out of the loop on everything SVN at the moment.
I, like many others I guess, have noticed the dramatic speed increase provided by gears, especially when on a lower-quality network-link, and can’t wait to be able to easily keep working on my blogs even if temporarily disconnected.
shinmai, thanks for stopping by. I’ll see what I can find out, or have someone in the know comment.
Andrew let me know that unfortunately there is currently no work being done to implement an offline mode in WordPress.
It would be a huge job and we’re not sure that we can currently offer something significantly better than the excellent offline blog editors like Scribefire, Livewriter, etc.
Definitely a good item to revisit again.
A couple things Andrew shared that are in the pipe:
* Gears support of Safari is almost there.
* There is some testing of caching the blog’s categories and tags in a local database to further speed up loading of the edit/write page. That would produce a noticeable speed increase only on blogs that have lots of them.
Andrew and team are closely following the development of Gears and as it evolves and implements new features, we will be bringing the most beneficial of them to WordPress. A new feature that looks very interesting is the ability to upload multiple files through Gears. That might be a good replacement for the Flash uploader.
Thank you Lloyd, for looking into the subject.
While I’m sad to hear offline usage is going nowhere, I’m definitely someone who’d benefit from having a local cache of tags in particular.
Independence of Flash is also always nice, mainly because Gears support for Linux and Windows Mobile is ligthyears ahead of Flash, and as I use both platforms a lot and have a tendency to upload way too many photos to my posts, a non-flash multi-file upload would definitely be something I’d like to see implemented in WordPress.
Thanks again for your great insight. I feel very well informed
Thanks for the infos Lloyd. Too bad offline mode is not planned. I would like to use this feature without installing a extra tool. I tried some software but so far did not found anything that was what is was looking for.
cheers
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