Google Gears breaks WordPress and Netflix

I recently discovered that Google Gears is responsible for breaking both Wordpress and Netflix.

Gears is a browser add-on that is supposed to facilitate working offline, I think. I never figured out what it was doing for me.

I added it to my Firefox browser probably a few weeks ago, and then recently I started getting a javascript error while managing my Netflix queue. At the time I didn’t make the connection to Gears. The error on Netflix was work-aroundable.

But just within the last week, WordPress started crashing Firefox. It first happened when I tried installing a plug-in, and then it happened when uploading images for blog posts. That I couldn’t work around.

A Google search turned up this at WordPress:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/267278

which led me to the Gears culprit.

Solution: disable Gears in the browser.

There is something suspicious, however, about the timing of these errors. I suspect that there was an update either of Firefox or Gears (I’m leaning toward Gears) that caused the breakage.

Hope this helps anyone else who is encountering this problem.

Jim Bursch  I am the creator of MyMindshare.