Google Abandoning Gears 139
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.
Summary is not accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that Google is abandoning Gears is not 100% accurate as it has bad connotations.
Google created Gears to fill the void until browser makers would implement HTML5. Now that they are doing so, Gears is being retired.
Re:Summary is not accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. HTML 5 is being deployed piecemeal, and Gears uses the HTML 5 features when they're available, falling back to its own functionality when it isn't. When all that Gears is doing is delegating functionality to the native HTML 5 implementation, it's pointless and just adds a layer of indirection that slows everything down.
Gears is out and works now. HTML 5 is starting to be widely deployed and all of the major browser manufacturers are backing it (MS announced IE9 will support it). When HTML 5 is universal, there will be no point in Gears. It never had a long-term future, it was just a prototype. Several of the HTML 5 features are lifted directly from Gears, so saying Google are abandoning Gears is no more interesting than saying Microsoft are abandoning Windows 95.
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If only people would leave IE 6 once and for all.
Re:Summary is not accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for those people who are still using IE 6 or Netscape 4.
That's their problem. The cost-benefit ratio of supporting those ancient systems (and enabling the defective IT departments that stick with them) just isn't worth it anymore. Let them have their Geocities-era sites and funky rendering while the rest of us enjoy the last decade's worth of progress.
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That depends. 60% of orders from our website still comes from customers using MSIE 6. Until that changes, I will continue to curse, kick, and scream that MSIE is broken.
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That's their problem. The cost-benefit ratio of supporting those ancient systems (and enabling the defective IT departments that stick with them) just isn't worth it anymore. Let them have their Geocities-era sites and funky rendering while the rest of us enjoy the last decade's worth of progress.
Have you played with Google's Chrome Frame [google.com]? It's a plugin that lets sites specify that IE should render them using Google's HTML-5 compliant rendering engine. You can even stick up a Flash-era "This site requires Chrome Frame" for IE users, but let all of the modern browsers go through.
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You're posting on a site that doesn't render correctly on IE6. Your points are invalid and you are a moron.
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Well, like I said: defective IT departments. That doesn't mean it's the fault of the department, but the end result is that they're supporting old, pathologically broken software and deploying more just like it.
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My old Spectrum won't let me access the web either; should I be supported?
There comes a time in the lifecycle of any technology or software product where you either have to move on, or accept that there are things that other people can do with their equivalent that you can't do with yours. You can only support backwards compatibility for so long, and so far back.
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"My old Spectrum won't let me access the web either; should I be supported?"
Yes, assuming if by "you" you mean 10million + users. It would be stupid for a business to cut that many people off all at once.
Beside, you use a spectrum, clearly you pirate software delivered from radio stations and not worth consideration~
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I would be not at all surprised if gears hangs around in some capacity to deal with the big pool of win32/IE6 users out there(if Google is half so interested in selling Google Apps to corporate customers as their advertising suggests, they'll h
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I doubt such a web app would have ever used Gears, and certainly wouldn't use HTML5, so it isn't a problem.
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In the corporate world, a lot of core training / timecard / expense "webapps" got hard coded to only work properly on IE6. So a lot of big companies (like the past 2 I've worked for) are still stuck with IE6 as their default browser because they didn't bother making their contractors adhere to web standards.
Microsoft's proprietary lock-in strategy was so effective that people can't even upgrade cleanly to their newer stuff :P
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Remember IE6 was released in 2001 when there were no web standard browsers that had any significant market share.
There's no reason why these companies can't update their applications or use another browser for their non-internal web browsing. Sounds like it's more of a problem for you than for them.
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There's no reason they can't bind the shortcuts for their internal apps to IE6 and not allow it to access the rest of the Internet either, then using Firefox or another modern browser to connect to the Internet.
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Fix 2: Require IE6.
You forgot "...and XP because IE6 isn't available on any modern OS." We're rapidly approaching the time when IE6 will only be available on new hardware via virtualization, so you might as well use something contemporary as the main browser.
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Heh, that's pretty much what I've been doing.
Step 1: get friendly with the IT department, so they don't have a problem with me doing step 2
Step 2: Install a "real" 64-bit OS on my work laptop, and then have IT help me reinstall their locked-down corporate build of WinXP in a VM.
It works pretty well, since I get control over the bare-metal bits for development and stuff, but still have a fully corporate-policy-compliant VM to check email and work on office docs and run IE6 for all the corporate crap.
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As I said, just because the internal app requires IE6 doesn't mean you have to use it for web browsing. It's a case of hating IE6 so much that one's common sense is disabled.
Re:Summary is not accurate (Score:4, Insightful)
This argument comes up time and time again. I don't think it is a valid one. Sure, a couple of corporate apps are limited to IE6. So? An admin could just make a shortcut in the start menu that launches IE. For the rest (ie. normal web browsing), the admin could install any of the more modern browsers.
I think the "IE6 lock-in" is a myth.
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Except some web sites/applications only work in IE6 and you try telling the sociopathic sack-happy PHB that he has to upgrade his favourite micromanagement software for x thousand dollars and explain why sociopathmonthly.com no longer renders properly.
Yes sticking with IE6 is stupid but take a look at the real world, it's an incredibly stupid world. How many companies do you think have built it's flagship product around IE and never expected MS to change it? There ar
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Please read my comment. There is no limitation on the number of browsers on a PC. Thus, a company admin could create icons in the start menu that runs IE6 and point towards the legacy stuff.
For the rest, he could use a modern browser.
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Please read my comment and try to understand the difficulties of getting a sociopath with actual power over you to do things differently. Adding a second browser onto their machine will not force them to use it and trying to force a PHB to do something they don't want to is not a simple or desirable task.
The biggest issue is that so much software is built around hacks into IE 6 for rendering, data input and other things. Many software developers did this beli
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OK yes I see what you mean. You have more influence over the software than the PHB or related factors.
So, Opera 10.10 will be the best Google client? (Score:2)
So now, with a browser having 100% perfect Acid 3 score even on mobile/ARM flavor, I should be able to use Google sites in their full function not missing a single feature, no quirks, no "browser.js" hacks.
Basically I should be able to use Opera 10.10 and I shouldn't be thinking a second about Google Chrome which wasn't released for PowerPC anyway.
Somehow, I have hard time believing that.
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Somehow, I have hard time believing that.
Why?
If every browser was as standards-compliant as Opera, Google wouldn't have needed to push Chrome. Yes; you should be able to use Google sites to their full function in Opera, once they migrate off Gears to HTML5.
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HTML 5 is starting to be widely deployed and all of the major browser manufacturers are backing it (MS announced IE9 will support it*).
* for very small values of "support"
FTFY.
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They will support it or find out the segment of their users hooked on GMail will suddenly desert them one day.
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Crap - I meant to mod you "Funny", but selected "Overrated". So I'm posting this to remove that mis-moderation.
Why isn't there a way to change/remove one's moderation of an existing post? Because there's no "undo", I'm having to throw away eight other mods I've made on other posts in this discussion.
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You get mod points more than five at a time? Interesting.
Sometimes I get five, and sometimes I get fifteen. I'm not sure what the deciding factor is.
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What about offline caching?
I thought that was part of Chrome OS so that it can still be used offline?
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Offline caching is a feature of HTML5.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html#offline [whatwg.org]
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Offtopic? Troll? Funny? You be the judge!
Why limit ourselves to just one? I vote for all three! Only thing is you now lose twice the karma,
makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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At my work, they're currently making plans to (finally) update from IE6 to IE8 (bypassing 7) and update from XP to Win7 (bypassing Vista).
HTML 5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes one wonder how much of this "HTML 5 will do this", "HTML 5 will do that" is hype or wishful thinking. Past experience has shown great disappointment in all this hyperbole...
Re:HTML 5 (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm pretty thrilled with what came out of AJAX myself.
Just google maps alone makes it well worth it.
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I'm pretty thrilled with what came out of AJAX myself.
Just google maps alone makes it well worth it.
The main Javascript object that does AJAX is XMLHttpRequest, which was originally a Microsoft ActiveX object. It had nothing to do with Google or HTML standards.
Shhh (Score:2)
We don't even imply that MS had any original ideas around here.
Re:HTML 5 (Score:5, Informative)
HTML 5 does exactly what it says it does.
Dive into HTML 5 [diveintohtml5.org] tells you what that is, and whether your browser supports it.
It's up to developers to apply it. Google is doing so.
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Re:HTML 5 (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML5 is pretty slick, but you have to remember most sites will never upgrade to it.
One of the problems with the web is whenever you add a new markup, you still have to support the old markup. One of the reasons I thought that XHTML was mostly a waste of time was that everybody involved in it was acting like a year after XHTML2 came out, HTML2,3,4 would instantly disappear and browsers could simplify their parsing, becoming faster... the reality is, the vast majority of sites will never switch over.
HTML5 is a better idea, since at least it's not a completely new way of doing things. But since it does the few things XHTML did that HTML 4 didn't, now browsers have to support a totally useless XHTML strict syntax in addition.
Ugh.
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actually some sites already have been using it for some time!
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I'm not saying people *shouldn't* use it, I'm excited about it myself. What I'm saying is, realistically, the majority of sites will never convert to HTML5. The lesson being: make your standards great, because they Never. Go. Away.
Sorry I shouldn't post at 6:30 AM
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Web sites that want to support it and also support legacy browsers will use something like Modernizr [modernizr.com] or other HTML5 detection techniques [diveintohtml5.org] and provide alternate content - like flash video as alternate content for HTML5 video, javascript or flash charts as alt content for canvas charts, etc.
Some features like sockets and web workers and local storage aren't really feasible for legacy browsers even with workarounds like Gears but a subset can be implemented for specific apps which is the focus of this topic....
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Most sites will eventually disappear.
Most sites that you will be using 10 years from now probably don't exist.
So, while most existing sites won't upgrade to it, at some point in the future most sites will probably be using either HTML5 or something later.
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I’m sorry??
I bet you are one of those “web developers” who “learned” it by reading a book while driving a cab, and know think you know everything.
XHTML was created, to finally put an end to the retarded mess that is HTML, and to have something professional. It was made, so that — just like with every other real compiler/interpreter — every time you fuck up, it fails to render the site at all, and shows you the error(s).
If you can’t handle that, you should not
As long as I can still have offline Gmail... (Score:2, Interesting)
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As long as Gears is perpetually behind on Linux/x64, it's a hassle. As long as Offline Gmail uses Gears, I won't use it. I have used it and think it's nifty but... not that nifty. I can send mail with and archive mail in Evolution, if need be.
Great news (Score:1)
Google has created a technology to adress the shortcomings of an old standard and now, as the new one reaches it's final state, Google tells us to use it.
Fantastic!! (Score:2)
Which part of this is it that Google != do no evil?
me.bows_down_to(Google)
What about offline gmail? (Score:2)
Abandoning gears has been obvious for some time - for instance, there's no support in the linux version of Chrome. However, the question is, when willl existing google services based on Gears move to HTML5? The most important one of these being, of course, offline gmail. Google has demonstrated a mobile offline gmail prototype using HTML5 around the beginning of 2009, so the delay is hard to justify on a technical basis.
One wonders if they haven't made a policy decision not to support offline gmail - to for
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Of course offline GMail will use HTML5. That's *strongly* implied by "we are abandoning Gears in favour of HTML 5"
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Exactly. GMail was the free provider who offered free IMAPS and SMTPS support, when Hotmail was charging for a HTTP based Outlook only system. I use a Gmail account with Alpine without any problems.
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You are a massive idiot and asshole.
"Forcing" you to use the online version of a free service so that there is a chance to display ads is not evil. It's not even remotely evil. It's not bad. It's not wrong.
You are a greedy shit. I would think that's actually evil.
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Abandoning gears has been obvious for some time - for instance, there's no support in the linux version of Chrome.
That's hardly a fair complaint, considering Chrome for Linux is not supported [google.com], either (yet).
Google hates anything that is offline (Score:2)
event the iphone app is just a front for the website. For Google Reader I use MobileRSS that downloads the first few lines of my feeds so i can read them offline in the NYC subway.
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They're already scanning your email to build up an advertising profile of you. They may lose out on a couple of ad views when in offline mode, but the extra data they're provided by you continuing to use their service instead of switching to a competitor is more than worth it.
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Oh yea, Google is evil. That's why they have been the first to have released APIs for nearly every service they provide on the web.
Oh wait..
Hey Google, (Score:1)
the only reason I'll miss gears (Score:2)
I had poor luck successfully using Google Docs offline, even though this was supposedly what Gears was made for. I still do find Gears useful for one thing - Wordpress. I obviously can't blog offline, and if I were writing a post offline I'd do it in Microsoft Live Writer or MS Word or something, but regardless, that's not how Wordpress uses Gears; it leverages Gears to cache common Javascript files locally so that the pages on the admin console load much more quickly. This makes complex procedures reall
Re:the only reason I'll miss gears (Score:4, Informative)
I'm no web designer so perhaps I'm misunderstanding TFA, but is offline script caching one of the features of HTML5?
Yes.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html#offline [whatwg.org]
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Thanks for the information! Sounds like HTML5 is a non-proprietary rip and replace for Gears.
Time to ... (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting idea of the day -1 (Score:2, Funny)
I'd been toying with the idea of making my existing webapp available offline, and just this morning began reading up on Google Gears to use it. I put the documentation down for a minute to check out /. and what do I see? Well, fuck.
Offline apps (Score:2)
So in short, I've never had a need for Gears.
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The only need I've had for Gears was on airplanes, and for drag-and-drop document upload on Wave.
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The couple of times I looked into Gears, the main feature touted by Google was the ability to use your web apps when you're not connected to the internet. This was reason enough for me not to spend a lot of energy on Gears, as in practice, in this day and age, I never find a computer that is NOT connected to the internet.
So in short, I've never had a need for Gears.
You don't think this will change as we move to more and more powerful mobile computing platforms? Already, my iPhone runs into issues at times when the network isn't available - when WLAN netbook/tablets/retinal implants drop from the network, this type of tech will be key.
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Do you don't use a laptop? Or do you have a 3G modem or something? That's the main point of Gears -- being able to edit a Google Docs document on a laptop without needing to find a wifi hotspot.
JavaScript speed wars (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yeah, because all four of you users who actually use Chrome, and because one of them actually cares... Riiight... :P
Gears?!! (Score:2)
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lots of folks are using wave... just use "with:public" and you'll find all kinds of stuff
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I got my invite last week and was surprised at the lack of supporting websites. The three automatically added contacts aren't interested in playing, so it's been a no-go for me so far.
I have a ton of invites (sixteen) if anyone wants one. Those who understand spamgourmet should have no problem emailing me.
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Everything you'd tried to apply some whale meme anaolgy to is wrong
Hey! Quit bashing WellThoughtOutAnalogyGuy!
Re:BLOAT (Score:5, Insightful)
stream of chars, I/O functions, drivers? (Score:2)
Hey if your going to mock, do it correctly. Need to output an integer? Use assembly instruction code to write to hard-coded address. Done.
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JMP $E456
instead of
JSR $E456
RTS
You can save yourself two bytes of stack space plus nine cycles of computing time.
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When programming for the Atari 2600 we sometimes jumped into the middle of a multi-byte 6507 instruction to save a byte or two. No excuse for that now, but plenty back then.
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What exactly is different or more efficient about making the browser parse new HTML tags and incorporate new libraries instead of making the browser run JavaScript every time the page is loaded and relying on third parties to produce browser plug-ins for standard web content?
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The problem is the "evolve" part. The current request->response model doesn't really work for web apps. An HTML5 "bag on the side" isn't a good solution.
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It's not going to happen, but the better solution is to design a new set of standards and protocols that include web apps capability as a first class design goal.
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Pushing functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting means longer launch times, more failure points, and more disparate functionality from browser to browser for developers to consider.
...and interactive sites that don't require a whole page load every time you want to change the tiniest thing. Yeah, so they're harder to develop (unless you're one of the 99.9% of web programmers who use a library to handle the differences) but I can live with that.
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I agree, that's why Flash is such a great idea. Instead of browser developers being bogged down fixing its multitude of problems, they just have to pester Adobe for a few years.
Seriously though, Adobe just announced that while Flash on Windows will support GPU acceleration, the OS X version will not (and I suspect neither will the Linux version). Adobe might take years to add a feature that Apple have already implemented for Safari's HTML engine (using the Quicktime library). Scripting means a single point
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No. This is essentially an extension of the cookie.
The web has changed. I don't like a lot of the changes, but this is one of the good ones. Actually, most of HTML5 is a great idea. Would you rather rely on Quicktime and Flash to do everything in the standard? I sure don't.
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This isn't true insofar as it is relevant to the issue at hand, and isn't relevant so far as it is true. First, HTML5 local storage doesn't push "functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting"; the browser functionality relies on JavaScript scripting. Second, because it pushes local storage
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Pushing functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting means longer launch times, more failure points, and more disparate functionality from browser to browser for developers to consider.
What utter bullshit. HTML5 doesn't "push functionality [from scripts] into the browser", it provides standards and functionality that cannot be provided in scripts. Scripts can't do video decoding. Scripts can't do geolocation. Scripts can't create a canvas. Scripts can't even provide new input element
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No, because HTML5 includes Gears' functionality. As browser developer teams upgrade their browsers to be adherent to the new standard, you won't need a plugin to use these features.
So, it's not hard to imagine that ChromeOS will be HTML5-compliant.
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No, it means that Google is planning on relying on HTML5 local storage (and related HTML5 features) to provide this functionality, instead of Gears.
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Cool, here you go. [google.com]