How To Install Google Gears on 64-bit Linux

This is just a quicky tutorial for anyone else hitting the problem I had: installing Google Gears on 64-bit Linux. Google has not released support for this officially, but are apparently working on it and while there have been no official beta releases to try it out, someone posted a 64-bit build on a forum post. This will give you an XPI, the packaging format used by Firefox extensions, but it won't work right away. Firefox needs some special instructions to make a link actually install something and the forum post doesn't include it. There are no obvious ways to tell Firefox, "Install this XPI at this URI," so what are we to do?

It turns out that it will initiate an installation if you select the XPI from the "Open File..." option in the File menu. So, download it locally and then open it in this manner, and you'll restart Firefox with a working Google Gears extension. Enjoy.

I've got to get back to work now. So little time to post these days!

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