Google Gears for Firefox 3.6 (Linux)

I have been missing Google Gears since the time I upgraded to Firefox 3.6 on my Karmic Desktop. Google hasn’t been kind enough to release an update. Yesterday while searching through Google, I came across this bug report on Google Gears Page.  I noticed that several people have been compiling Google Gears (Joys of Open Source!) for their platforms. In fact custom compiled version for Firefox 3.5 are available for download here. However I couldn’t find any compiled versions of Google Gears for Firefox 3.6. So I decided to give it a try.

I used the same compilation steps as were used for Firefox 3.5 in the aforementioned link. After about an hour of fixing compilation errors, I had a compiled version of Google Gears for Firefox 3.x (Disabled Firefox 2.x support. Its time to upgrade!). Here are the final steps I used to compile Google Gears:

svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gears-read-only
cd gears-read-only/
wget http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears-firefox-3.5-x86_64/gears-gcc433.diff
wget http://birdbrain-downloads.googlecode.com/files/gears-r3420-ff3-ff36.patch
patch -p0 -i gears-gcc433.diff
patch -p0 -i gears-r3420-ff3-ff36.patch
chmod +x third_party/gecko_*/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/*
make -C gears clean
make -C gears -j3 MODE=opt OS=linux
ls -l ./gears/bin-opt/installers/*.xpi

The Google Gears XPI file can be found in ./gears/bin-opt/installers/. To add the compiled extension, go to FILE => OPEN FILE and point to the compiled xpi file. Restart your browser, and you should now have Google Gears support in Firefox 🙂

I tested the extension and it seemed to work fine on Gmail/WordPress/RTM.

You can download the compiled version from here.

wget -c http://birdbrain-downloads.googlecode.com/files/gears-linux-opt-0.5.35.0.xpi

My current system which I used for compiling has Karmic Kubuntu 9.10 with GCC 4.4.1. The binary has been tested only on Firefox 3.6, but might work for all Firefox 3.x on Linux. Won’t work for Firefox 2.x as it has been disabled in this particular build.

Please let me know in your comments if I have bungled up anywhere.

6 comments

  1. Hello BirdBrain,

    I an on OSX 10.4.11 and am not very computer savvy at what you cannot do
    It might be that this cannot work period but if you think it is possible couled you explain how and where I should put your file

    I do not understand the instructions my apologies

    1. Hi Malcolm,

      This won’t work on OSX, this has been compiled for Linux. Try http://bit.ly/a3EKIs, download the file from there. Somebody posted that on the Google Forum and lot of people claim it works. The way to do it would be click on the File menu => Open File and then browse to the downloaded file.

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