Google, Google Gears was a great utility that really advanced the capabilities of browsers off-line. However, now that Firefox 3.5+ and Safari 4.0+ support HTML 5's offline capabilities, the needs for Gears seems greatly reduced. Firefox 3.5 also supports geo-location (thou not yet desktop Safari). Therefore, my suggestion is more with the direction of using HTML 5 offline support in your applications (docs, reader, gmail) so that we will not have to wait for Gears updates when a new browser comes out and so that you can focus on other things since gears is less relevant. You could change Gears to support HTML 5's offline approach for IE only since it would not be needed for Firefox and Safari.
Thanks, Steve
