Google Gears loses out to HTML5

David Heath
Sunday, 21 February 2010 13:16

Business IT - Technology

Google will migrate all Gears functionality to HTML5 and eventually allow Gears to fade to black.

In the first Gears blog posting in over 8 months, Ian Fette, of the Gears Team has announced the gradual but inevitable demise of Google Gears.

Pointing out the ongoing difficulty of implementing Gears in a number of new environments (such as Safari on Snow Leopard), Fette has indicated at all future efforts will be directed towards implementing equivalent or better functionality under the upcoming HTML5 standard.

Observing that migrating applications and databases from Gears to the standards-based approach of HTML5 will be difficult, Fette notes that "We will continue to support Gears until such a migration is more feasible, but this support will be necessarily constrained in scope. We will not be investing resources in active development of new features."

He continues, "Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue."  No time-line for the cessation of such support was provided.

In promoting the new tools, the announcement offered, "In January we shipped a new version of Google Chrome that natively supports a Database API similar to the Gears database API, workers (both local and shared, equivalent to workers and cross-origin wokers in Gears), and also new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. Other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, are also represented by similar APIs in new standards and will be included in Google Chrome shortly."

Justifying the chance, Fette observes that "Looking back, Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such as the ability to offer offline access in GMail, to a large number of users. Long term, we expect that as browsers support an increasing amount of this functionality natively and as users upgrade to more capable browsers, applications will make a similar migration."

Clearly, users of Google Gears will need to commence migration and re-implementation planning, although there is no date for the cessation of these tools.