Two years after Google launched Gears, the company has decided to move on to HTML5, and will not rely on Gears any more.
Google Gears is a small application that lets your browser interact with web pages more closely – enabling you to cache various elements of webapps offline, and adding drag-and-drop functionality.
This lets you access your email offline, even compose emails (that will be sent next time you go online).
Gears was not just for Google apps, they have a public API that web developers can use to allows their sites to take advantage of Gears.
Gears is a small software that can be installed as an addon to your web browser, like Firefox, IE and Safari (on all platforms) and also Android. The functionality of Gears is built into the Windows version of Chrome.
However, in the Linux and Mac dev builds of Chrome, Gears is not incorporated.
Why?
This is because of the new cross-platform open standards introduced by the HTML5 specification – which allows compliant browsers to gain functionality similar to Gears (and even better than it).
In support of the HTML5 spec, Google plans to let Gears slowly die out.
A spokesman for Google wrote to the LA Timesto clarify the issue. He wrote
“We’re continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it’s a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.”
However, most mainstream browsers today don’t support the HTML 5 spec yet. So we’ll need to wait a while to be truly rid of Google Gears.
However, as Google has said, they will be continuing to support Gears for a while, so there’s nothing to be worried about yet.
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Hi, My name is Narayanan and i'm your resident blogger. Technology and internet have always fascinated me and that's the reason behind the origin of this blog. Thanks for visiting Tech Spikes :)