Farwell Google Gears, we hardly knew you…

For those of you not familiar, Google Gears was an API used by developers to enrich the web interaction between users and their data.  In layman’s terms, Google Gears allowed web-based services like Gmail and Google Reader to store content locally on a computer. This, in turn, meant that emails and RSS feeds could be accessed even when the end-user didn’t have an active data connection. In essence Gears turned a web-service into a hybrid-webservice that lived in the cloud but behaved more like a resident program that was ready and available all the time.  The API has only been around for three years.

Well Google Gears as we knew it is going the way of the proverbial dodo. The development team has shifted its focus and is moving in a new direction. And that’s where it gets interesting.

But first, the change in Google’s own words…

Posted in the Gears Blog:

If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately,it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We’re not there yet, but we are getting closer. In January we shipped a new version of Google Chrome that natively supports a Database API similar to the Gears database API, workers (both local and shared, equivalent to workers and cross-origin workers in Gears), and also new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. 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.

We realize there is not yet a simple, comprehensive way to take your Gears-enabled application and move it (and your entire userbase) over to a standards-based approach. We will continue to support Gears until such a migration is more feasible, but this support will be necessarily constrained in scope. We will not be investing resources in active development of new features. Likewise, there are some platforms that would require a significant engineering effort to support due to large architectural changes. Specifically, we cannot support Gears in Safari on OS X Snow Leopard and later. Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue.

Okay, so why is this so interesting? Well it seems that there is a pretty significant shift toward using HTML5 for active web content and offline use and this just heats it up a bit further. YouTube, Google and other sites are going the HTML5 route at just the time when Apple is making a stink about not putting Adobe Flash on the iPhone and using… you guessed it, HTML5′ instead.

Apple was the first to take a major shot across the bow of Flash and since then it seems to be HTML5 this and HTML5 that. In a way it increasingly feels like we are going to have another VHS vs Betamax/HD-DVD vs Blue-Ray type fight on our hands going forward.  Which technology will ultimately succeed is unknown but right now it is pretty interesting to see HTML5 gain traction with the likes of Apple and now Google behind it.  Dan had a few words on the subject just yesterday.

Time will tell but this is sure getting interesting.

And to all of you who depend on Google Gears in its various forms… I feel your pain. I hope the new version is everything Google hopes it will be and that making the transition to it is relatively easy.  We don’t need anymore complications when it comes to our computing lifestyle.