More evidence for Google not being evil. I certainly can't imagine any other company of Google's size cheerfully abandoning a technology that has been supplanted by open standards. Google just seems to reflexively prefer open standards, whether it suits their corporate interest or not.
I don't disagree with the premise. But the phase-out of Gears is because it wasn't a revenue stream, but rather a means of enabling new scenarios on the web that weren't otherwise possible. Its standardization is a win for everyone, including Google.
Having an open good web is absolutely in Googles financial best interests. If people spend more time online, Google makes more money.
So I think it's not a case of not being evil as such, it's just that their interests are absolutely aligned with users - to build a free open web with as much accessibility as possible.
Hopefully Google keeps Gears alive long enough for HTML5 to really take root. Though relying on any kind of plugin is undesirable, Gears supplied a functionality that was useful and unattainable any other way. I'm glad to see that the innovations spurred by Gears will soon be ubiquitous without the need of the plugin itself.
this is awesome news, the introduction of gears always worried my as it looked to be fighting web standards as opposed to leveraging them, nice to be proved wrong.
I wonder why gears wasnt initially a plugin that let you use html5 apis in browsers that didnt have support?
You've got it backwards, Gears was the zeroth version of the LocalStorage, Web Workers, and Geolocation APIs: HTML5 is based on it
It was always an experiment, a way to test this stuff out without putting it in Webkit or Gecko where people could depend on it. All of the APIs changed form when they were standardized, with some being abandoned (LocalServer and Desktop).
they arent ever set in stone, browsers can quite happily ignore web standards from time to time. Would have made upgrading from gears just happen by magic though.
