Updates Announced For Google Gears And Google Desktop

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Google announced Monday that it has launched Google Gears for Apple’s Safari browser on Mac OS X.  All Safari users running Mac OS X (Windows isn’t supported yet) can now access Gears-enabled sites like Zoho Office and the YouTube Uploader.

Google also announced Monday that it has released Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows, which the company claims, will increase performance and make it a more agile service.

According to Google, it performed a number of operations to determine where the slowdowns in Google Desktop were occurring. After finding those issues, it was able to cut memory usage by over 50 percent and fixed issues where third-party applications were causing Desktop and the computer itself to slow down.

To improve performance on the front-end, Google installed a service that will analyze all the Gadgets running on the Desktop and inform users when it’s slowing it down. At the same time, a malware indicator was added to ensure certain Gadgets are not stealing information from others.  (Kind of makes you wonder, huh?)

Both the Google Gears and updated Google Desktop for Windows are available now.