Gears for Safari Requires Input Manager Hack

Gears, Google’s API for offline web applications with local storage, is now available for Safari. Alas, it requires an input manager hack:

When you install Gears, you’ll notice that it’s composed of 2 components: an NPAPI plugin which lives in “/Library/Internet Plugins” and an InputManager. Gears needs to load first thing upon browser startup, for cases in which the first page loaded into the browser is from the Gears offline cache. NPAPI provides no mechanism for loading that early (it only provides support for loading plugins the first time a page specifically includes them) so we needed a small InputManager to do the work for us.

★ Tuesday, 16 September 2008