Hello HTML5
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post makes official what the Los Angeles Times reported in November 2009 — that Google was waving goodbye to Gears and hello to HTML5 — but now in Google's own voice on the Gears API Blog. The explanation for the quiet: releases and posts stopped because the engineering effort moved into web standards.
The arc matters because Gears began as a stopgap, a browser plugin adding offline and local-storage powers the web platform lacked when TechCrunch took a fresh look at it back in October 2008. By February 2010 Google is saying the destination is HTML5 itself, with the caveat that the work is not complete — Gears' capabilities are not yet fully standard.
First-order effects
- Developers building on the Gears API now have their roadmap answer: the plugin is effectively in maintenance mode, and new offline-capable apps should target HTML5 features instead.
- Google's own engineers shift from shipping plugin releases to pushing Gears-style capabilities through the standards process, making browser vendors rather than Google the delivery mechanism for those features.
Second-order effects
- Browser makers face direct pressure to implement the offline and local-storage pieces of HTML5 quickly, since Google has publicly committed its flagship web app effort to them replacing a plugin that worked everywhere Gears did.
- Third-party sites that embedded Gears must plan dual code paths or wait for standards parity, giving early HTML5-implementing browsers a concrete advantage with Google-aligned applications.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the era of single-vendor capability plugins gives way to a web where offline access and local data live in the platform itself — a structural win for open standards over proprietary add-ons, contingent on how fast the unfinished HTML5 work actually lands.
The trend: Browser plugins that pioneered missing web capabilities are being dissolved into HTML5, with Google converting Gears from product to proof-of-concept for the standards track.