Gears is a plug-in for web browsers which aims to make browsers a lot faster, allow them to store data on a user's machine, identify where a user is via geo-location and provide the ability to write files to the desktop.

At the time of writing it was available for Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux and Mac OSX in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and the Safari web browsers. In other words, all major browsers except Opera. Opera are known to be working on a version that works in their browser as well.

People can either visit gears.google.com and install the plug-in or if they visit a website that uses Gears, they will be asked if they want to install it. Chrome has Gears bundled already.

Because Gears has access to the local file system, permission has to be given on a site by site basis as to whether or not the site can use Gears. Certain functions of Gears, such as geo-location also have to be authorised on a site by site basis as well.

Gears is used in a number of Google owned web sites, most notably, Google Docs. Google Docs is an on-line word processor. If your internet connection drops or if you are travelling without an internet connection then your work is stored locally and synced back to Google Docs when you next have an internet connection. Google reader also implements Gears, giving you the ability to store 2000 stories to be read off-line.

Non-Google web sites that use gears include WordPress.

In May 2008, the project was open sourced and renamed Gears. So now anyone can look at the code and contribute to the work.

Many of the features that Gears brings to a web browser are part of the forthcoming HTML 5 specification and Gears is an attempt to bring these features to the most popular browsers now. In other words when browser creators have implemented the HTML5 specification then Gears will become obsolete.