The Firefox add-on Gears, formerly known as Google Gears, allows you to use web applications as if they were installed on your computer. Consider it as a fancier offline browsing.

So, basically the data instead of being completely stored on the web is actually stored in your computer. You’ll have access whenever you want. The number of websites compatible with Gears isn’t that huge at the moment but there are some very good ones already adopting it such as RememberTheMilk, Google Docs, Zoho, Google Reader, and most recently MySpace.

Gears has been extra handy on my laptop, in places with no wi-fi I can still browse through the day’s headline news and continue to work on some documents with Google Docs. I just wish for the day to come when GMail comes out with Gears support.

Dear readers, any other websites you would like to use Gears with?