Google Gears Ends as Separate Project
Gears Team project manager Ian Fette revealed in the Gears blog why development on the product was stalled for months: the project is to lose its independence because the effort on Gears was to become part of HTML5 and Chrome.
The newest version of the Google Chrome browser from end of January already has a number of APIs that have similar capabilities as Google Gears, as was revealed in the Gears API blog. Examples are database and storage APIs. In other places, namely in the recently developed HTML5 standard, features such as application caching were introduced where coverage through Gears is also redundant. The Gears project has survived so far by promising support for Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer, but development is coming to an end. The Safari browser for OS X Snow Leopard and later already no longer works with Gears.
Google Gears consists of a browser plugin and an API collection. The project started in May of 2007 as a kind of patch to make web apps available online. A note to new projects: Ian Fette adds in his blog that no migration possibilities currently exist for Gears apps.
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