Google has just released a new offline WebApp Firefox and Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears.

It basically offers a persistent relational database that you can access from JavaScript, as well as a way to run JavaScript code asynchronously, which is important if you have to run expensive code.

We now have Firefox itself, Google, Adobe and Microsoft offering ways to take web applications offline. Google’s offering is quite easy to integrate into your site, and I expect that many people will install it in their browsers as soon Google starts to use it in their own applications.

As Google has released it under the BSD license, I wonder if they’ll be able to get Mozilla to integrate it into their browsers. That seems unlikely because Firefox 3.0 will have a similar feature of its own, but they could still distribute it with other applications Google offers.