Google Gears Beta

‘Google Is Watching You’ headlines asside, a friend just pinged me the url for Google Gears
http://gears.google.com/.

From my first recce, it seems to be an open source extension for your webrowser that acts as a local server for caching, storeing and serving resources – I see it as a local proxy to for web applications. Seems like it would involve a certain amount of re-writing of your application, but sounds very interesting…