I’ve used Gears on Firefox religiously since the day it launched, to maintain access, when I’m offline, to my feeds in Google Reader, documents in Zoho and Google Docs, and tasks in Remember the Milk. I’ve also used Gears to speed up some of the functionality in my various WordPress installations. I like Firefox a lot, but I’ve always had a more stable browsing experience with Safari; and even though all browsers tend to acquire a large memory footprint over time, Firefox has been the king of memory hogs. As a result, I’ve found myself handling basic browsing in Safari, and tasks that require specific plugins or Gears in Firefox.

I won’t stop using Firefox, but getting Gears on Safari is a big step forward from my perspective, and it makes sense, given Safari’s support for this kind of offline caching.

• * Gears for Safari beta
• * Gears Drives the Next-Gen Web
• * Offlining with Google Gears
  

Firefox 3 looks better, runs faster, and runs somewhat more efficiently than Firefox 2 (your results may vary). It’s built on a brand new version of Gecko, and besides the speed improvement, I’ve seen a slightly smaller memory footprint. (Thank goodness for that!)