Netscape Navigator and Google Gears
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).
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