Howto Install and Use Google Gears and Offline Gmail Browsing

Google Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:

-Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
-Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
-Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop

For linux and of course for Ubuntu the requirements (requirements are for 32 bit install) to run Gears are :
-firefox 1.5+
-glibc 2.3.5+
-libstdc++6 (for Gears 0.3)
-libstdc++5 (for Gears pre-0.3)

This howto will show you howto install Google Gears on Firefox 3.5.x or 3.0.x and use beta offline Gmail feature (beta) with it.

Installation:

Install Google Gears by going here.Some users have firefox installed on different sources and reported that they are getting this error with Firefox 3.5.1 :

"Your browser is not currently supported. Please check the list of supported browsers below."

OR

"Google Gears 0.5.29.0 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 3.5.1."

If you get these errors, to fix it you can do one of the followings :

-Install this user agent switcher extension and spoof as some other versions of Firefox.(i recommend this one).
-Install compiled XPI from here (32 & 64 bit versions plus you can find howto compile it yourself there.)
-You can always use Ubuntuzilla project to install latest version of Firefox.

After installation done, restart firefox.

Offline Gmail Settings:

Now navigate to Gmail, then click Settings.Click Labs tab and enable Offline Gmail, click Save Changes.Now Gmail page will be reloaded and you will see Offline button near Settings.Click it and a wizard will pop up, and ask a couple of questions (desktop shortcut etc).Before clicking offline, you can change your offline browsing settings under Settings.(attachment sizes, content etc).

In a couple of minutes or hours (this depends on your connection and e-mail size), it will be done.

For the ones who want to create a shortcut manually, you can always make an icon with this command :

"/usr/bin/firefox" "https://mail.google.com/mail/"