Speed Up WordPress 2.6 with Google Gears

Yesterday I spend lots of time playing with new WordPress 2.6 and one feature I liked most is support for Google Gears which really speeds up admin panel tasks.

I feel everyone must use this feature which once enabled transparently speed up your wordpress dashboard, so here are step-by-step instructions…

1. Log into wordpress admin panel. Click on Turbo link in top right corner.

2. If you have no Google Gears preinstalled on your machine, you will be asked to install it first. Just go through simple and quick Google gear download & install process. At the end you need to restart your browser and again repeat step 1, which will bring this time “Enable Gears” option.

3. Clicking on Enable will show a confirmation pop-up box. Just mark the checkbox and select Allow option.

4. Now wordpress will start downloading some files. It may take few minutes if you have slow Internet connection but this is one-time process only.

5. Once please wait message disappears, click on close button. Thats it!

If you have fast internet connection you may not feel much difference but users will slow internet option will immediately notice speed improvement while performing admin panel tasks. Please note that this will not at all improve your blogs performance at front-end.

As of now this works only with Firefox 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Support for Safari 3 is not yet available.

Google Gears works with browsers so if you use Firefox and Internet Explorer on same machine, you have to Enable Gears separately for both browsers. Also if you use two or more machines for daily blogging tasks you have to Enable Gears separately on them.

Link: Download Google Gears

Related: Take Google Reader offline with Google Gears