The following is the text I posted to portableapps.com announcing this release. I'm courtesy-posting it here as well, even though I expect a fair bit of negative flack from the Gears developer community for doing this. Users have been begging for a Windows XPI version since as far back as 0.2.2 (top results from just 5-minute Google searches) and the fact that it's still not available is really hurting some of us. Hundreds (or more) of users of Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition have gone as far as to copy all the Gears files manually into a GUID- named extension folder, essentially guaranteing that the user *won't* get updates when they are released. That certainly can't be in the best interest of Gears development.
Please understand that my intent here is not to alienate Google, Inc., or the Gears developer community. Rather, I'm hoping quite anxiously that Google will release a Windows XPI via either the official Firefox addon distribution system (AMO), or with a proper updateURL, so that Gears may be installed as a non-Administrator user in a user profile (as opposed to system-wide). A significant number of users who would benefit from Gears (besides portable-Firefox users, a Google Apps user on a company-issued laptop is a prime example) are currently unable to use Gears normally because of the single updater-based install method. [sigh] So, to the developer community, if there is some way we can cooperate in this work, I'm all ears. Please don't hesitate to contact me directly. ===== I went to some pretty careful lengths to put this together so as to fall under USC 17 fair use exemptions, but I believe this is legal to do, so here you go! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13492/ This version of Gears installs and works in Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition, as well as any non-Administrator account in a normal Firefox installation. This is because it installs into the user profile, NOT system-wide. It's in "Experimental" status because it's brand new. Please, if you have an addons.mozilla.org account, log in before installing and add review comments. It can only be promoted to public status after it gets positive reviews. The packaging for this is dead-simple, really: I have one sandbox WinXP system where the GoogleUpdate task is running, updating system- installed Gears binaries. When a nightly script detects a change, it e- mails a notification to me. Then all I have to do is ZIP the Gears Firefox folder, and upload it as an XPI file -- done! No files in Google's official Gears distribution are altered, but the XPI includes only the files needed to work under Firefox; it completely (and deliberately) omits the IE binaries and the GoogleUpdate.exe app. If this can get promoted to Public status on AMO, then updated versions will be detected by Firefox's built-in addon update mechanism automatically, no GoogleUpdate required. This is how the extension really should be for Firefox users (and is, for every platform EXCEPT Windows).
