LA Times is reporting:
“We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites,” wrote a Google spokesman in an e-mail.
I complained a while back that things seemed too fragmented. To date I’ve been pretty leery of things because I wouldn’t want to support two competing methods or require users to either download Google Gears or use a browser that supports cutting edge technologies. It’s either too much effort and code footprint, or too much effort from the user perspective to download another binary.
A few Google folks replied to my earlier blog post and noted that they fully intended to work towards convergence. I’m glad it’s finally becoming a reality. I hope Google Gears will continue to be developed for the purpose of filling in missing functionality for certain browsers that tend to fall behind and simply let the browser take over if and when it eventually supports that functionality. That would create a consistent environment across platforms and browsers.
1 reply on “Google Is Moving Away From Google Gears”
And contrary to your earlier post, I think this is how things work. Innovation comes from people introducing their own features (XMLHttpRequest, Gears, etc), which once proven to work can be adopted elsewhere and incorporated into the standards. You can’t just sit in standards committees and wait for decisions to be made – you need to build new things, and feed them back to those committees as a source of ideas and experience.