Google Dumps Gears for HTML5
It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.
Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery.
In the mists of time, back when Gears first launched, we wrote, "We've written many times before about the need for offline web app access... And guess who is most at risk with this announcement? Yes, Microsoft. Google after all has many of the top 'best of breed' web apps now."
This was before Google's Chrome browser had hit the scene, and the Gears project was a collaborative effort between Google, Opera, and Mozilla.
But in our coverage of last year's Google I/O conference, we wrote of Gears, "We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all... in today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day."
Not only could Gears be used to take online data offline, Google had more in store for Gears users.
A few short months later, Google announced a geolocation API for mobile devices running Gears. We wrote, "We think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them."
But the party ended with Snow Leopard's release. Changes in the newest Mac OS and Safari 4 prevent Gears from running on some newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears.
As one Google rep told the L.A. Times, "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."
Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are.
UPDATE: According to blogger Mark Milian's unnamed sources at Google, Gears will continue to be supported for sites that already use it. However, the rep continued, "We expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
Still, this statement marks Gears' graceful and gradual retreat to obsolescence as HTML5 is coached for its center stage place.
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"A change in the newest Mac OS prevents Gears from running on newer Mac computers."
Whoah... I'm mighty curious about the story behind this.
Actually there's an unofficial version of Gears for Snow Leopard from the author of Mailplane (an excellent site-specific browser for Gmail, highly recommended). Get the download and read the caveats here:
http://mailplaneapp.com/download/google_gears/
Interesting timing, because just today I was playing around with Google Wave by dragging and dropping files from my desktop into a wave ... which is one of the behaviors enabled by Gears that isn't included in HTML5 (yet).
Any indication of how imminent the mothballing of Gears is?
Without Gears, Google would be severely limiting the potential of their most full-featured web apps, at least in the short term. It seems like something that needs to stick around for at least another year or two until either A.) Chrome gets waaaay higher adoption, or B.) IE and Firefox get waaaaay better support for HTML5.
Actually, HTML5 does support drag and drop of files. See, for example, https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_files_from_web_applications -- where we document support for this in Firefox 3.6.
@Warren - HTML5 drag and drop is being developed and already works in Firefox 3.6 see here for a demonstration http://www.thecssninja.com/javascript/drag-and-drop-upload
Gears is definitely not going to be implemented in Chrome. See http://crbug.com/7443. That suggests that GMail, etc will support HTML5 before Chrome OS is released.
I am really looking forward to html5 now and what it can offer, @ryan that is great news.
HTML5 is long overdue. Too many sites rely on Flash to get things done, and that is a pile of trouble (leaks, crashes, etc). Instead of using another 3rd-party tool (Google Gears), developers need to be able to use a standardized language. HTML4 was great for a long time, but bring on HTML5 + CSS3.
The term HTML5 is being used erroneously, by Google, and other parties.
First, the offline storage is managed by the Web Apps group, and is not part of HTML5.
Second, geolocation is not part of HTML5.
Drag and Drop is currently part of HTML5, but may not be in the future, and could potentially be split off, also to the Web Apps group.
I wish people would stop using HTML5 erroneously. And I wish Google would stop trying to dominate and control the development of HTML, just because it employs the one and only HTML5 editor.
And I wish people would actually read the HTML5 spec, to understand what is, or is not included, before commenting on it.
@Shelley:
"HTML 5 contains several features that address the challenge of building Web applications that work while offline"
- http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/
@Andrew Jones:
I think you mean this bug: http://crbug.com/17443
I'm not happy about this. Assuming that people always have internet access nearby is a very US-centric approach that leaves a lot of the world behind. Colleagues of mine just came back from a major, international conference in Nairobi, Kenya, with almost 2,000 participants. This was in a huge, modern conference centre in the middle of one of Africa's most developed cities. However, it was almost impossible to go online. I think it's important to remember this digital divide when assuming that people don't need offline any longer.
@mario, do you see any of these features directly in the HTML5 specification? Such as local storage or client side databases?
No, because most have been split off into other specifications, all under the Web Apps umbrella.
The more accurate statement should be that Google is giving up Gears in favor of the W3C Web Apps specifications.
Re: my comment about drag-and-drop not being part of HTML5, I was basing that on what I remember (or possibly mis-remember) Google saying during the initial Wave demo, which was that they were working to get drag-and-drop included in HTML5, but right now it required Gears.
Regardless, my point was simply that HTML5 (regardless of what is in the spec) is not implemented in the vast majority of browsers that regular users are currently running. It seems like it's premature to shutter Gears before all the HTML5 goodness is widely available and widely adopted.
In a world where a shocking number of users are still happily running IE6, Gears is going to be needed for a long time if Google wants to see wide adoption of their products. That's why I'm surprised to hear they're killing it off.
Um, Gears is open source. If people want this project to live on, they can fork it and keep it running...
I think Google has shown a bit of smart pragmatism here to drop the dead donkey rather than be left with a host of useless technologies in a decade.
I guess that's a demonstration of the flexibility internet applications. It's relatively easy to migrate the underlying code.
So if it's that official, like this article claims, where's the link to the original announcement from google?
Seems to be it can't be too much to include at least that, that is, if it's really true....
I call BS.
I'm glad they're doing this. I'm not too worried about HTML5 supporting drag and drop. It'll get there. @Roland This is definitely true. It's been all over the news.
HTML5 (and all other HTMLs) are "Markup Language", they are used for giving structure to what would otherwise be free flowing data. Whatever you can do in HTML5 you can do in any other form of HTML, more specially so of XHTML. In fact, I would go as far as saying that XHTML is more open and extensible than HTML5. Although I really don't want to bring up the HTML5 versus XHTML debate...
The more important thing that I would like to bring up is that HTML (inc. HTML5) is a data language where as gears is an events-based (or actions based) system. In my opinion HTML shouldn't be made an events-based system, think about what happens when you merge your CSS and your JavaScript into your HTML (this: bad accessibility and lower SEO).
It seems to me that instead of Google producing Gears, it's expecting the Web Browsers to take control of how to interact with the Operating System. So the only difference is merely between perspectives, and this shouldn't be restricted to HTML5 only.
Disclaimer: They are my opinions based upon my experience, and I respect the opinions of others which may be just as correct (or possibly even more so).