WordPress has had a Turbo feature for a while now. The feature uses Google Gears to store many of the Admin Dashboard resources (images, CSS, etc.) locally on the client machine. This improves overall performance and responsiveness of WordPress.
If you read the technical details on how Gears is being used, you’ll see that no fancy SQL or Worker Threads are needed to make this work. Only the offline cache is needed. Firefox 3.1 is shipping with the necessary HTML5 Application Cache support to implement the same feature natively – no Gears plugin needed.
In fact, a native approach means the “Turbo” link isn’t even needed – it just works. Better yet, the long list of instructions for downloading and installing Gears is completely avoided.
It. Just. Works.
Hopefully, the WordPress bug to add support for HTML5 Application Cache lands soon.
That’s good to hear that it’s possible to get it working natively. And I agree that it should be implemented in WordPress soon, so all HTML5 compliant browser users can benefit. Gears is fun and games, but open standards are better.
I am sorry for posting this here, but I had a question unrelated to this post. I was reading through your posts on mshtml and mshtml hosting. You mentioned that you were able to implement a spell checker, what I wanted to ask you was would you have any simple sample code on how walk the text range word by word.
Thanks
CD
Will it be possible to use the offline cache with XUL files or is it limited to HTML only? Our application loads XUL from a central server and it would be nice to cache all of the UI in a more permanent way on the client.