I view Gears as a way of rapid-prototyping features that can then be specced in HTML5, providing an open-source implementation of those features for browser developers to use, and bringing HTML5 features that are native in some browsers to other browsers that lack them (e.g. we could use Gears to add to IE if desired). In this sense it seems like a useful complement to the standards process. I don’t know much about BrowserPlus; hopefully the Yahoo! folks will be similarly interested in moving as many browsers forward as possible.

Personally I think W3C needs to put some more emphasis on specs including levels of implementation, and milestones that parties agree to meet. Publishing a spec. and hoping someone implements it is pointless and a waste of time. Each vendor implementing random pieces at their own leisure helps nobody as the features are useless until it’s available to all browsers (or plugins implementing functionality). In this respect, Google’s approach is good since it succeeds. The failure I see is to have all this legacy code that won’t work on non-Google Gears enabled browsers because it’s not up to spec. Bloating the spec is out of the question too.

I guess I’m more of fan of incremental efforts rather than giant monolithic specs.

There’s no easy fix or it would have been done years ago. But I question if the seemingly diverging efforts are the best method. In particular because we have to live with anything that doesn’t converge at the end.

Unfortunately, standards bodies are seldom inclined to add groundbreaking new technology until multiple vendors have implemented and proven it. It’s a chicken and egg problem that we’re trying to correct in HTML5 and WhatWG.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is interop not “standards”. To that end, Gears is working with Mozilla and WebKit more closely to attempt to come out of the gate with roughly compatible features. It’s just not practical, however, to expect this to be perfect overnight. There will be a period of divergence and a period of convergence. As long as everyone involved is committed to the convergence (and I get the strong impression this is true this time around), this should happen much faster than it has in the past.

You all rabbit on about how browsers need offline storage and desktop integration when fundamental elements of the most trivial web-only based applications are not natively supported. See rich text editing. All the blogs of this world and all the CMSes have the most clunky, diffficult to implement text editing environments, it’s pathetic! Midas, contentEditable, babble on however much you like. The web needs fundamentals before it pretends to be a medium that can support genuine desktop-comparable applications.

Meanwhile Flash just continues to plough it’s security and performance compromising way forward.

*sigh*

A simple way to fight off Flash is to give standards-supporting developers some decent visual tools. Where are rounded corners in the priority list? Where are multi-position background images?

The web is farked, I’ve had enough.

I’m not so sure that the last browser-divergence sheds any light on the current situation. For one, the browser vendors and plug-in providers seem to be talking.

And the concept of progressive enhancement will mitigate some of the possible fragmentation:
- canvas is almost the perfect test-case. Surely no-one designs a web-page that can live without canvas.
- Gears vs BrowserPlus vs mozilla-extras. I think there will be libraries to abstract the common features, and proghancement for the rest

I also think google (search) will be a stabilizing influence here. If you want people to find you with google then you have to present your data in such a way that google can find it.

Anyway, predictions are tricky, especially about the future (so feel free to tear apart my wishful thinking).

@monk.e.boy: Unfortunately I feel the need to, because people like you can’t be civil.