Google abandon Google Gears for HTML5

Development on Google Gears – which was launched 2007 to enable Google users to access accounts, such as Gmail and other services, while offline – has now been dropped in favour of HTML5. HTML5 is the new web protocol which makes it possible to play videos and other embedded content on web pages without the need for a specialist plug-in, such as Adobe Flash.

Google announced the move on its blog, saying that programming effort would be devoted to bringing all of the Gears capabilities in to line with web standards such as HTML5.

"In January, we shipped a new version of Google Chrome that natively supports a Database API similar to the Gears database API," wrote Ian Fette, a Google engineer, on the blog. "Other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, are also represented by similar APIs in new standards and will be included in Google Chrome shortly.
"Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such as the ability to offer offline access in Gmail, to a large number of users. Long term, we expect that as browsers support an increasing amount of this functionality natively and as users upgrade to more capable browsers, applications will make a similar migration.
"Gears has taken us the first part of the way; now we're excited to see browsers take us the rest of the way."

Google warned that it would not be able to support Gears in Safari on Apple's most recent operating system, Snow Leopard. Support for Google Gears in Firefox and Internet Explorer would continue.

What is HTML5?
HTML5 is a new technology standard that aims to reduce the need for special plug-ins – such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight – to view the videos embedded within many web pages, as well as some animated websites. Instead, HTML5 allows this content to be viewed directly through the browser.

NewsSource: Telegraph