Back in March 2008 I wrote an article about online Office tools. One of them was Google Gears. With the progression of cloud computing, the Google Chrome browser, and the emergence of a new HTML standard, Gears appears to no longer have a shelf life.
HTML5 is the new standard. It has been designed to solve the same problems
that Gears was designed to fix. HTML5 has become a Web standard. Even Microsoft with its penchant for proprietary solutions has jumped on this bandwagon.Linus Upson, Google's engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, states, "This isn't an area we've been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We're very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible."
Google intends to continue to support Gears for existing customers. What made Gears so attractive was its ability to allow users to operate Web applications and store the data from them when not connected to the Internet. Gmail and Google Docs were two Google applications that I tested and used this way. But lately Google has been demonstrating offline Gmail using HTML5. And now Google is building this functionality into its Chrome browser. Safari is using HTML5 to create similar functionality. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE6 cannot support HTML5 so users of that browser will find themselves out of luck.
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