Now this is a bit of sad news. Just when BlackBerry OS 5.0 brings us Google Gears support rumor has it that Google themselves are abandoning Gears. Google Gears was released 2 years ago and was supposed to help online applications support offline use. It looks like Google is focusing on HTML5 and its offline features for future development. This makes me hope that RIM has Torch Mobile working on HTML5 support in their WebKit based browser…
Gizmodo was kind enough to collect some of the evidence that Google Gears is going the way of the wind:
- Gears is not supported in Mac versions of Chrome
- Standalone Gears is not supported in Snow Leopard, months after release
- Google’s been evasive about Gears support in Chrome OS, even though offline web apps are a vital part of it
- Google hasn’t announced a new Gears-compatible product in months
The LA Times Mike Milian wrote an article about the lack on Gears in Chrome for Mac and got this response back from a Google spokesman:
"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."
Roberto Not Registered
Posted: December 2, 2009 at 5:50 AM EST
well, chrome for mac lacks a lot so 😛
and i think that html5 is “native” of webkit, at least i think that the iphone browser supports it, and it doesnt support that many things 😛
Chris W Not Registered
Posted: December 2, 2009 at 10:43 AM EST
What part of Gears are we talking about? While there is the offline/caching part that will presumably be part of HTML 5, there is also the database component (sqlite). The latter feature is available for BlackBerry Widgets but is not part of HTML 5 and so will not be obsoleted by it.