This evening, I came home and loaded up Drudge Report. I found an interesting article on Google and how they’re about to challenge Microsoft even farther with offline web applications. Upon discovering the name Google Gears, I promptly typed “gears.google.com” into Firefox. Sure enough, a Mac OS X beta of Google Gears is available and of course, I downloaded it.

So what is Google Gears? It’s an open-source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs. What that means is that you’ll be able to use Google’s Writely word processor offline and online, making it a direct competitor with Microsoft Office. This is huge stuff and Google is really going to stick it to Microsoft this year. Can Google overtake the biggest software company of the 1990s? Maybe. We’ll see soon enough.

Google Gears [Google]