About Google Gears

Google Gears is a free browser add-on available for most Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer users. It enhances your web browsing experience by adding features to your browser that websites can leverage to speed up and improve performance. Learn more about Google Gears.

Google Gears is well-suited to sites like iStockphoto, where the speed of the site is affected by how quickly your browser can load cached items.

How iStock implements Google Gears

First off, let us just say that we're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears. None of our normal functionality is dependent on it, and iStock will continue working exactly the way it does now whether you install it or not.

If you do install Google Gears though, iStock will work much faster.

File caching: Gears allows you to temporarily store files to your computer's hard drive. Basically it creates a personal cached version of any given page you visit. Which means that when you return to that page after your initial visit, things like image thumbnails and some javascript and css files won't require a server hit and you'll get a much faster page load.

We will clean out these personal caches daily, so your machine won't get filled up with unnecessary files.

We have plenty of other future plans for making the most out of Google Gears as well.

Privacy Concerns

Currently all of the information and files stored on your computer by Google Gears is non-private. This means you needn't have concerns about allowing Google Gears on public or shared computers. We also offer you a quick and easy way to remove all of the data that iStock stores on your computer using Google Gears.