The widgetry is called Google Gears and doesn't work with the Google Docs and Spreadsheets suite yet - but it will, Google said, as well as with e-mail and calendaring.

Google's applying the mojo first to its RSS Reader, which goes out and collects updates to whatever web sites and blogs users keep tabs on. They can now be read offline on a plane, say, or on the African veldt if you download what you want first, making it useful for places in the Third World where Internet connections might be dicey.

Gears-blessed applications will go back to being online once a connection is re-established.

Gears is a JavaScript browser plug-in that Google is making available as open source under a BSD license so other Web 2.0 AJAX-writing developers use it, upping the pressure on Microsoft.

Adobe, Opera and Mozilla have already partnered up. Adobe said it would be in its Apollo environment.

Gears' beta source code is at http://gears.google.com/.

Google, which intends making Gears a browser standard and is back to talking about the browser as a development platform, released the code in time for its very first skills-netting Developer Day. Google said it works with IE and Firefox on Windows, Linux and the Mac.

Google expects to have consumer code in a few months.

The widgetry involves a local server for caching and serving and an open source SQLite database for storage. There are JavaScript APIs for storage, application caching and multithreading.

See http://reader.google.com.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street Google crossed the $500 barrier again on Thursday. Maybe this time it will stick.

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