Why is Google Reader's Gears Implementation Still Such A Kluge?

If you have Google Gears installed you can download and read up to 2000 items from your RSS subscriptions in Google Reader when offline...at least that's the way it works in theory. In reality, it downloads far less of your unread items. I cannot make sense of how it determines what it's downloading and what it's not. I'm guessing it's only downloading new unread items, while unread items that are only a few days old are left out. This just doesn't make sense to me. If the limit is 2000, download 2000! Not just 1100ish.

If that's not annoying enough, it often doesn't want to complete the upload synchronization when back online. It gets to around 20-40% and just sits there and will stay there for hours if allowed. Did Microsoft have a hand in this annoying, broken product?!

This time of year is always extremely busy for me, but coupled with the construction, having time to use an internet connected computer is an infrequent luxury. However, I usually find myself able to use my notebook a few hours each day where I could catch up on my feeds and it simply stinks that I cannot use this time to read most, if not all, of my feeds as Gears/Reader promises.