I noticed a new item in the top right of my Google Reader window today:

Interesting! I clicked the Offline link and was introduced to Google Gears (beta).

After a short installation and a restart of Firefox, I was greeted with a little green arrow in Google Reader. Clicking on it started a background download of 2,000 recent RSS feed items, which became available to me even when I wasn’t “on the wire”.
Once again, Google shows the rest of the world how powerful tools can be made simple. Will GMail Offline be far behind?

Popularity: 18% [?]