Solo Technology

Using Netscape Navigator 9 and wondering how to get Google Gears to work? Earlier today I was wondering the exact same thing. Never fear, your answer lies below (err, assuming you’re a Windows user).

This morning I was catching up a bit with Google Reader on my laptop and planning to spend some time offline.

“Self, we should go all offline mode in Reader and do some catching up later,” I said to myself (because that’s what I call myself). I did the Gears installer thing, restarted my browser and …

Nothing. Now, keep in mind this is a bit more than “just” a regular extension. It’s a fancy installer and everything. My initial thought of just hacking the .xpi was quickly dashed.

I headed to the Gears Group with the assumption that this had probably come up before. A quick search proved me wrong (am I the only one in the world admitting to using Navigator 9?) but there was a likely enough thread so I jumped in and asked my question.

Aaron, apparently from the Google Gears team, kindly responded to a few of my posts and offered up a registry key that ought to get the job done. I think there was a small omission in his key, but it got the wheels churning and I managed to figure it out with a slight modification.

After all that buildup… here’s the scoop: To get gears working with Navigator, just add the following string key to your registry (remove the carriage return in the middle, I added that just to get it to fit):

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Netscape\Navigator\extensions\
{000a9d1c-beef-4f90-9363-039d445309b8}

with a value of C:\Program Files\Google\Google Gears\Firefox\ and you should be good to go after your next Navigator restart (which is an option right from the File menu).

One Response to “Netscape Navigator and Google Gears”

1. Blinkdir on November 2nd, 2007 11:43 am
   

   Thanks for this article. It’s a month I was trying to get Google Gear to work with Netscape…

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