14 DAY TRIAL // Google Gears has been deprecated more than a year ago. Yet Google continued to support it to enable apps already using it to still work. But legacy support is now over, Google Chrome 12 will no longer be bundling the Gears plugin and versions for new browsers such as Firefox 4 or Internet Explorer 9 will not be built.
"With all this now available in HTML5, it’s finally time to say goodbye to Gears," Aaron Boodman from the Google Gears Team wrote.
"There will be no new Gears releases, and newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 will not be supported. We will also be removing Gears from Chrome in Chrome 12," he added.
The Gears plugin offered several advanced features, enabling websites to act more like apps than pages of content. Web apps using Gears could store files locally, have databases and manipulate local files.
Gears also offered APIs for geolocation, browser notifications and so on, many of which are now built into Chrome.
Gears were needed since there were no other alternatives at the time. HTML5 was progressing quickly, but it was poorly supported and the most important APIs were not yet available.
The situation has changed so much so that Gears is no longer needed and its development no longer justified.
Google announced last year that it will not be working on Gears anymore. However, the then current functionality was still supported enabling those that leveraged it to still use it. The Gears plugin was built into Chrome and plugins for other browsers were offered.
This will no longer be the case, developers are strongly encouraged to update their apps by using what standard technologies like HTML5 have to offer.
Already, most of Gears' features have been replicated in HTML5 and are supported by most modern browsers. But apps taking advantage of these features are still few and far between. In fact, Gmail still uses Gears for offline support.
And Google is falling behind, offline support, which was offered via Gears, was dropped in both Reader and Docs for many months now. Google promised to re-implement the features using HTML5, but, so far, offline support is still not available.