If you’ve been using Google Gears for Mac, you might have noticed sometimes that the Gears setup for a particular web site… sometimes vanishes. You have to re-enable Gears for each web site which you had approved it for.

Why is this? Well, Google is deploying the Gears setup inside of /Users/yourname/Library/Cache (or, ~/Library/Cache as we commonly denote the path as).

Well, this isn’t really a good place for Google to store Gears data. I can see why they did it… after all, all Gears does is cache files, and the logical place for cached files is… the Cache folder! Wouldn’t it be great if other Mac developers thought with such clarity.

However, with Gears, you don’t want that data wiped out easily. When it is wiped out, you have to go back and re-approve each site to use Gears. Typically, savvy users may clear a cache after a major Mac OS X update (say, 10.5.5 which was released yesterday). Clearing a cache isn’t necessary… I don’t want people to think that they have to. But, if you’re extremely tech savvy… some of the tinkering around that you do, can cause the cache to become a problem. Hence, normal users are fine, but enthusiasts may want to clear their caches.

Worse, tech savvy people are the most likely to install Gears. Hence, the people most likely to use Gears… are the most likely to clear caches as well.

My suggestion would be to move Gears data to ~/Application Support/Google/Gears as that would avoid the problem. Alternatively, a future version of Gears probably should save true cache data inside of ~/Library/Cache while keeping the approval data in the new folder I just suggested. That way, the next time you run your browser (after clearing a cache), Gears would just re-download/update the cached files automatically.