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Linux Google Gears – No effect?


Has anyone tried the Linux version of Google Gears? I installed it like week ago and tried it with WordPress, Google Reader and some other small apps that support it but I felt no effect in speed at all.

Is it just me or did anyone else experience this no speed effect with Linux version of Google Gears?

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  • http://stefanoforenza.com Stefano F.

    I didn’t tried myself. Seems like one noticeable difference of speed should be opening the ‘make link’ dialog from the editor. Usually it takes c.a. 1 second without gears. Many users reported it to be much faster w/ gears.

  • http://www.mitechie.com Rick Harding

    Maybe I missed part of the memo, but the point of gears wasn’t speed really, but the ability to get at your google reader items offline. I’ve used it for that a couple of times and it seems to work just peachy. I’ve not tried it with WordPress.

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  • http://Syntux.net Jad

    Stefano F,
    Yeah, that’s one of GG features, to cache and run JavaScripts in background and I noticed the performance

    Rick Harding,
    Shouldn’t it also affect the speed and performance in online mode? Not sure if I got the guy right Offline functionality for web app but this is how I interpret it.

    Another thing, you have to keep the website/app open in order to get it in offline mode.

    It’s an interesting project anyway.

  • http://vadi-blog.com Vadim P.

    Haven’t tried it myself even, since they don’t have a 64bit version.

    Kinda odd for an open-source product, but oh well.

  • http://jeremy.visser.name/ Jeremy

    Yeah, I’ve used Gears with WordPress and noticed no speedup whatsoever.

    Not only that, but they don’t even provide Linux-amd64 or Linux-ppc versions, which prevents me from using it on a day-to-day basis, pretty much.

  • http://linuxexpert.wordpress.com Ramy Eid

    I don’t think that gears speed up things, and I am not sure where gears fits in wordpress ?

  • http://Syntux.net Jad

    Vadim P & Jeremy
    There is an Unofficial 64bit release of google gears and some people reported that it worked fine.

    Ramy Eid
    If you check the main page of Google Gears, the third feature there is Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance and I believe performance means speed in this sense?

    As being sure if gears fits in WordPress maybe you should read this WordPress Gears and according to Matt The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable. so maybe by the end of my bandwidth cap cycle I’ll have the chance to test it when my ISP drop my connection to 128 :-)

  • http://anotherugly.wordpress.com Ketil

    Here’s a more updated xpi, from the same thread: http://groups.google.com/group/gears-users/msg/caca20ce5633a3af?
    If you have Greasemonkey offline wikipedia script installed, this version will segfault Firefox on *every* render of wikipedia pages.
    There’s a more recent version killing this bug, but noone has posted a 64 bit xpi for it yet.

  • Jeremy Bicha

    I don’t believe Google Readers uses Gears for speeding up the site, just for offline access (downloading 1000 items to read). WordPress does use Gears to cache some images & scripts but if your connection is fast enough, you may not be able to see much of a difference.

  • http://Syntux.net Jad

    Ketil
    I believe Mozilla needs to re-architect Firefox, actually you could have full desktop up and running with all useful tools that you would ever need just with Firefox and its extensions but things gets slower the more extensions you load.

    Jeremy Bicha
    Although I limited my http to 15k but I didn’t feel any different with WordPress & Gears, maybe I’m missing something here or it’s yet not that super hero caching solution.

  • http://www.rakeshamudala.blogspot.com deepthi

    i think there might be no effect on it ……

  • http://www.hilarity-ensues.net grandnooblar

    Google Gears 0.5.21.0 doesn’t seem to be working for me using LinuxMint 6 – It hasn’t requested permission to use gears on any websites…

    I was hoping it would help a bit for my mother who’s stuck on 20kbps dialup, but it’s probably rather redundant since this machine has a localhost caching DNS and caching proxy.

    Guess I’ll be removing google gears :(

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