March 11th, 2011 | by Aaron Boodman | published in Google Gears
Last February, we let you know we were shifting our focus from Gears to HTML5. Over the last year or so, we’ve been working closely with other browser vendors and standards bodies to help define and standardize HTML5 features across browsers, and we’ve worked hard to improve these HTML5 capabilities in Chrome:
- We implemented support for application caches, which are a great replacement for Gears’ offline features. App caches are already being used by web apps like the NYTimes app in the Chrome Web Store. There is also full-featured debugging support for application caches in Chrome’s developer tools.
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- Together with our friends at Mozilla and Microsoft, we proposed, specified, and implemented the IndexedDB API. This can take the place of the Gears Database API.
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- We implemented the HTML5 File API, which is very similar to the Gears Blob functionality.
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- We implemented the geolocation, notifications, and web worker APIs, which were pioneered by Gears, natively in Chrome.
With all this now available in HTML5, it’s finally time to say goodbye to Gears. 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.
The code itself will of course remain open source, and anyone is free to use it.
Our mission with Gears was to enable more powerful web applications. Over 5 releases, we added tons of APIs, enabling everything from offline access to parallel computation. Now that these features have all been adopted by browsers and have official W3C specs, they are available to more developers than we could have reached with Gears alone.
Edit: Corrected timeframe for removing Gears from Chrome.
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Gears Team
February 19th, 2010 | by Ian Fette | published in Google Gears
Posted by Ian Fette, Gears TeamIf 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 no…
February 19th, 2010 | by Ian Fette | published in Google Gears
Posted by Ian Fette, Gears TeamIf 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 no…
May 28th, 2009 | by Ian Fette | published in Google Gears
Posted by Ian Fette, Gears TeamIn conjunction with Google I/O we’re releasing a new version of Gears, 0.5.21.0. This version includes minor bugfixes and three new features:Drag & Drop support for dragging files into a web page and letting the web p…
May 28th, 2009 | by Ian Fette | published in Google Gears
Posted by Ian Fette, Gears TeamIn conjunction with Google I/O we’re releasing a new version of Gears, 0.5.21.0. This version includes minor bugfixes and three new features:Drag & Drop support for dragging files into a web page and letting the web p…
October 21st, 2008 | by Aaron Boodman | published in Google Gears
Andrei Popescu, Gears TeamGuess what? The Gears Geolocation API got even better! We have just released a new version of Gears, 0.4.24.0, which contains an enhanced implementation of the Geolocation API. This new version uses WiFi access point signals t…
October 21st, 2008 | by Aaron Boodman | published in Google Gears
Andrei Popescu, Gears TeamGuess what? The Gears Geolocation API got even better! We have just released a new version of Gears, 0.4.24.0, which contains an enhanced implementation of the Geolocation API. This new version uses WiFi access point signals t…
September 15th, 2008 | by Jeremy Moskovich, Gears Team | published in Google Gears
Posted by Jeremy Moskovich and Matt Perry, Gears EngineersWe’re really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11).You can download it today from http://gears.google.co…
September 15th, 2008 | by Jeremy Moskovich, Gears Team | published in Google Gears
Posted by Jeremy Moskovich and Matt Perry, Gears EngineersWe’re really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11).You can download it today from http://gears.google.co…
August 22nd, 2008 | by Chris Prince, Gears Team | published in Google Gears
Posted by Andrei Popescu, Gears EngineerBut where exactly is ‘here’? Well, that’s a question that takes on a whole new meaning with this new release of Gears: we have added a new Geolocation API, which allows you to build applications that can do new a…
August 22nd, 2008 | by Chris Prince, Gears Team | published in Google Gears
Posted by Andrei Popescu, Gears EngineerBut where exactly is ‘here’? Well, that’s a question that takes on a whole new meaning with this new release of Gears: we have added a new Geolocation API, which allows you to build applications that can do new a…
August 6th, 2008 | by Brad Neuberg | published in Google Gears
Posted by Brad Neuberg, Google Developer ProgramsWe are constantly asked what are best practices when working with Gears. For example, what’s the best way to work with the local database for performance and reliability? What are good architectures for …
August 6th, 2008 | by Brad Neuberg | published in Google Gears
Posted by Brad Neuberg, Google Developer ProgramsWe are constantly asked what are best practices when working with Gears. For example, what’s the best way to work with the local database for performance and reliability? What are good architectures for …
July 14th, 2008 | by Brad Neuberg | published in Google Gears
Posted by Brad Neuberg, Gears TeamI’ve posted an in-depth article and tutorial on creating a client-side search engine with Gears. Here’s a short snippet from the article:Did you know that you can use Gears to do fast, client-side searching of data, si…
July 14th, 2008 | by Brad Neuberg | published in Google Gears
Posted by Brad Neuberg, Gears TeamI’ve posted an in-depth article and tutorial on creating a client-side search engine with Gears. Here’s a short snippet from the article:Did you know that you can use Gears to do fast, client-side searching of data, si…