Comments on: Is Google Gears safe?

By: Terry Mulcahy

Terry Mulcahy — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:31:13 +0000

The Google Gears dialog certainly got my attention – it appeared on a well known national news website.

If it doesn’t affect performance, I choose “deny!”

What is the “rules of order” nostrum, when opinion is tied, go with the status quo.

By: spiralofhope

spiralofhope — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:43:37 +0000

I thought Firefox add-ons were explicitly banned from making any disk writes outside of their specific directory.

Once I saw that Gears could create a handy little desktop icon for me, I abandoned it completely. I don’t want some random extension to have access to read or write to my system like that. Ever.

Firefox I can mostly trust. Google I don’t.

By: Stephen Bradley

Stephen Bradley — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:39:53 +0000

What surprises me is that there is no way to sign a Gears App. Adobe AIR is much better in this respect, in that all apps must have a digital signature for the installer to work.

I do think that the generally trusted brand of Google will make end users trust Google Gears Apps more than they perhaps should and yet another tool is being provided for malware authors.