Google Abandoning Gears

harrymcc noted a story talking about what might be the end of Google Gears. The concept has always been interesting, but it seems that Google is beginning to think of Gears as more of a proof of concept, and that focus will shift to HTML5, which has the same functionality.

makes sense

[fedorfedor]

Gears was a smart way to get important new features into stagnant older browsers (we're looking at you, IE...) and implemented far more quickly than any standards process allows. Now that those features are in the HTML5 standard, there's no reason to require gears. Until the next round of feature-adding, of course...

As long as I can still have offline Gmail...

[madsci1016]

...I won't really miss Gears. Since right now Offline Gmail uses Gears, I don't want it to go away.

Re:Google hates anything that is offline

[Transfinite]

Really? you don't think that if you have a client side DB that is network aware, that can sync when it reconnects that it can't a) inject ads b) record what you do c) sync all of the above when you re-connect? I'm sorry but get prepared for offline analytics and ads

JavaScript speed wars

[PCM2]

One of the more overlooked features of Gears is its JavaScript parser, which allows apps to execute JavaScript in a separate thread from the rest of the page to improve performance. Now that Google has released Chrome, it makes less sense for it to keep working on a hack to allow Firefox and IE to run JavaScript more efficiently. Chrome is incentive enough for Mozilla and Microsoft to start doing that for themselves.