Well, we've known for a while that Google was throwing considerable weight behind
HTML 5, and that one of the purposes of the markup language is to do away with plug-ins for Internet apps, so it makes sense that eventually
Gears would go the way of the Dodo. But so soon? Linus Upson, the man in charge of both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS engineering teams, has announced that the company is done developing the software. "We are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears]," the man said in an interview with
PC Magazine. "We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don't want to break anything out there." If you listen to this guy, it sounds like this was the plan, all along: "When we started the Gears project, three years ago... we did it because we couldn't get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications." He then details the mind trick: Google ships Gears, and suddenly browser vendors are "very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications," paving the way for the capabilities in the next version of HTML. Clever, Google. In the same interview, Upson stated the company's plans to move all its apps to standards-based HTML 5 APIs. Now that it's convinced the world that it wants -- nay,
needs -- rich Internet applications, we hope that the company will promise to use its powers of persuasion for good, and not for evil.
posted December 1st 2009 10:57PM
Huh, I wasn't aware that Google was heading the development of the new Gears of War game...
Interesting... It's funny that RIM just got Gears integrated with it's browser and just like that it'll be useless.
@MRCUR
It doesn't really mean that it was a horrible idea. Besides, they have a full webkit browser coming next year anyway.
@MRCUR
It's not useless. Google Gears always was and still is a temporary bridge to widespread HTML5 adoption and offline storage standard.
This is just another non-story story.
@MRCUR When you consider that Gears has been in the works for a while and we really didn't know squat about HTML5 until....well pretty much now. I would say it was a worthwhile endeavor. Even if it was a bridge to nowhere.
Fair enough.
Google uses it's products to drive standards forward. Google would rather not have to maintain separate pieces of software to get what it wants, since not every user bothered to download Google Gears.
But, the rewards Google can get from localized ads due to the Geolocation API in HTML5 probably makes all the development time for Google Gears well worth the effort.
I'm glad Google is here to make all the important decisions in my life. I never would have known what I wanted out of HTML 5.
@claytontlewis
Truth be told I don't think anybody seriously uses it even though firefox had it for a while now, some sites have tech demos but that's it.
So sadly yes it will take google to get it into actual use.
AMD/ATI has the same issue, they invent new clever things, add them to hardware, offer them for free, and nobody uses them and all the potential goes lost.
Since when has google ever done anything evil?
@(Unverified)
It's more the potential. They track pretty much everything you do and a lot of people use gmail and other Google services so you can see how much power they have.
@(Unverified)
Stealing the copyright of every out of print book they can get their hands on is pretty evil.
@(Unverified)
"DOUBLECLICK"
@Paul Yah and I have the potential to get a gun and kill someone, but that doesn't mean I am going to. People shouldn't base their trust in something based on a possibility. If you are going to base it around something base it on facts. Fact: I don't trust MS because of their track record. Fact: I'm starting to trust them a little more due to their resent behavior.
Fact: I trust Google because they have yet to show any signs of being a douche, other then that Android take down notice which still irks me. When they start acting like MS 2.0. Then lets talk.
@John Doe
That's why they don't sell guns in europe you see, and why there are fewer deaths..
@Wwhat
Yeah, except for Switzerland, where they're mandatory?
@Wwhat
yes but you see there's a reason we can buy guns here though granted it's a pointless reason now, but whole point was to help keep people in charge and not the government so if government started take to much control and do things against peoples wishes we could rise up and be capable of fighting back, but as you can see these days that is not very possible U.S. gov is king of propaganda and turns average citizen into a sheep, and they amass such powerful weapons that citizens cant and shouldn't be able to attain mostly that the gov can and will do what ever it pleases, and if you disagree than you are amongst the majority which are mindless sheep who are told what to believe
Finally, no more firefox trying to install windows media player plugins and crashing miserably. No more Quicktime black-bar on Vista/7 x64. HTML 5 can't get here soon enough!
If Google's evil I'm screwed...I use Chrome, gmail, and I own an android phone....
@B3astofthe3ast
Advertisers are evil, so yeah it doesn't look good, but you should swim with the flow until you feel the grip relax and then head for shore I'm told.
@B3astofthe3ast
When Google flips the skynet switch, it will probably offer you the job of a being a battery while it looks to slaughter us all. You still have a chance!
@B3astofthe3ast
I'm right there with you. These days my day-to-day life is absolutely reliant on and built around Google's products. I use Gmail for _everything_, my Android phone gets me through the hours of the day, Chrome is the only browser I'm willing to use (and also manages to be the first browser in history that I've actually liked instead of just tolerated), and Google Search is damn near the only research tool I've used in a decade.
@Chefgon
Ditto Here. I depend on Gmail, Reader, Google Voice, Picasa, and Youtube. I'm pretty much Google's b*tch. If they flip the evil bit to 1 then I'm going to need nothing short of a 12 step program to move off.
So what does HTML 5 do?
What's it about?
Sorry for ignorance, I've just been hearing "it's a new standard" and it "will replace plugins"
?_?
@(Unverified) Well, for one thing it has and tags so you can imbed audio and video without having to use plugins like flash or for various random video codecs. It also has tags to allow basic 2D drawing, and several other added tags. It basically takes all these things that people had been doing with various plugins (Flash, silverlight, java, and random video codec plugins) and provides a standard so that they can be implemented in the browser itself.
@(Unverified)
In comparison to Gears HTML5 offers the same offline storage features. This will allow web apps to, more or less, act like traditional desktop apps and be available offline along with caching data. So for example an HTML5 version of GMail could allow you to view your contacts, view some cached e-mail, write and que an e-mail message to send when you were online again. This is very important for the future of web apps. Along with standardized multimedia elements this allows HTML5 to offer a very desktop like experience on any HTML5 compliant browser.
Wait. What? No "Google Gears grinding to a halt" pun?
@Philippe
I think that the picture is speaking several thousand words here though. a headstone is better than any pun.
The grammar police would like to remind you that there is no space in "HTML5". Thank you, and have a nice day!
Open Sauce?
It's strange that I read Dodo as doodoo....
I seriously just downloaded this 3 days ago, now im pissed!
Linus Upson......sounds like something you say before a magic trick lol
@Loick
Tingle! Tingle!
Linus! Upson!
*flys away on a red balloon*
Never heard of 'gears' until today, and I would never install google (spyware) nonsense in my browser anyway.
My look and stance, sorry if you can't handle it.
What is going on?!
HTML 5 has nothing to do with Google Gears =|
Just because he mentions the two in the same press release doesn't make the two directly related! Causation vs. Correlation .. come on!
They are two entirely different technologies.
@nAv
HTML5 supports offline storage, which is what Google Gears was meant for.
HTML 5 WOW! also take a look at new Google Search. Its pretty cool.
http://www.zjtechlive.com/try-the-new-google-search/
I see it as something canned because takeup was poor with the appropriate excuses thrown in, and so would you if it were another company.
Buy AdMob, can gears, got it! So does Apple and the indexing machine.
I'm usually the first to point out how much the kids at Google suffer from ADD, but in this case I agree this is a non-story.
Quick! Someone name a new Google Gears feature they need or bug they've been dying to have fixed. Yeah, that's what I thought.
Google is the most uniquely forward-thinking company in the business. It seems like every move they make is intended to affect things five years down the line. I don't know of any other company in the software industry that expends so little effort on short-term gains and losses.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is most certainly a unique thing.
@uberFu
And yet somehow, I still wouldn't mind. Probably because they'd use the content of my thoughts to somehow make my life easier and more organized and supply me with the service for free.
Except that Google Gears DID break one thing for me...
Gmail offline storage! Sometime last week, when I logged in, the loading gmail page got stuck on infinite reloading. First made sure it wasn't the better gmail 2 plugin or greasemonkey plugin.
I wish they could at least fix this one thing. Maybe it is fixed by now...
@(Unverified)
thats what we think.. for now. As we speak there is probably some evil A.I system running Google waiting for Google to take over some construction aspect and then BAM. Skynet will be born