It was over two years ago when Google announced Gears, which promised to make Google services—and potentially lots more—available offline. Since then the project has moved at a creep, all but stalling entirely. Gears, it seems, has died.


Mark Milian and Harry McCracken have been collecting the murder evidence, which has been mounting for months:

• Gears is not supported in Mac versions of Chrome

• Standalone Gears is not supported in Snow Leopard, months after release

• Google's been evasive about Gears support in Chrome OS, even though offline web apps are a vital part of it

• Google hasn't announced a new Gears-compatible product in months


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All this is decidedly circumstantial, but it hints that Google is planning to wait to HTML5, which supports a lot of the same offline features as Gears, before putting all their eggs in one basket. Then, this:

We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But 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.

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This is directly from Google in response to Milian's post, and stops short of kicking Gears to the curb, but only just. Here's what it really means: Google will quietly move away from Gears, let it live out its life in comfort, and after starting a beautiful family with HTML5, pretend that it never existed. [LAT, Technologizer]