So, no sooner had I posted the last post on my blog when I saw that Google are seriously considering dropping Google Gears at all.
Google are dropping support for the most important piece of software in the last 10 years?
Yes, and no.
Google introduced the world to the idea of offline applications by creating Gears. But maintaining it in all the different browsers and all the different Operating Systems (and variations of each) is painful. And was necessary until HTML5.
But HTML5 is a standard way to implement offline applications, it will be implemented in all browsers soon enough and it will be implemented in a standard way. And Google doesn't need to maintain it.
Google gets what they want and they don't need to support it.
One of the new features in Chrome that separates it from other browsers is the speed that it runs javascript. This became a major feature and forced Mozilla to speed their javascript up to compete. IE will do the same. (Mozilla had a faster javascript engine but they released it sooner than they would have otherwise done.)
So Google don't need Gears but it has already changed the world.
