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Google Abandoning Gears
harrymcc noted a story talking about what might be the end of Google Gears. The concept has always been interesting, but it seems that Google is beginning to think of Gears as more of a proof of concept, and that focus will shift to HTML5, which has the same functionality.
Saying that Google is abandoning Gears is not 100% accurate as it has bad connotations.
Google created Gears to fill the void until browser makers would implement HTML5. Now that they are doing so, Gears is being retired.
Gears was a smart way to get important new features into stagnant older browsers (we're looking at you, IE...) and implemented far more quickly than any standards process allows. Now that those features are in the HTML5 standard, there's no reason to require gears. Until the next round of feature-adding, of course...
lots of folks are using wave... just use "with:public" and you'll find all kinds of stuff
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Makes one wonder how much of this "HTML 5 will do this", "HTML 5 will do that" is hype or wishful thinking. Past experience has shown great disappointment in all this hyperbole...
...I won't really miss Gears. Since right now Offline Gmail uses Gears, I don't want it to go away.
what! doesn't anyone actually think things through before opening their mouths anymore? Everything you'd tried to apply some whale meme anaolgy to is wrong. Developers need to get this into their heads: 1. the days of request -> response -> request are going 2. more load is going to be placed of client resources. 3. Data should be stateless, your client will retain state HTML5 improves efficiency, removes latency. So why is that a bad thing? WebWorkers, WebSockets??? No? Then go and read the specs before to dismiss them off hand.
You're right. I think we've all taken the wrong approach with huge, bloated standard libraries. Let all developers write all code from scratch. Need to output an integer, just write the code that turns the integer into a stream of characters, then pass that stream of characters into your homebrew I/O functions, which pass them off to your custom built drivers. There's no need for all languages to have this functionality! It just makes developers have to code around the differences and bugs in each runtime!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Google has created a technology to adress the shortcomings of an old standard and now, as the new one reaches it's final state, Google tells us to use it.
What exactly is different or more efficient about making the browser parse new HTML tags and incorporate new libraries instead of making the browser run JavaScript every time the page is loaded and relying on third parties to produce browser plug-ins for standard web content?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Abandoning gears has been obvious for some time - for instance, there's no support in the linux version of Chrome. However, the question is, when willl existing google services based on Gears move to HTML5? The most important one of these being, of course, offline gmail. Google has demonstrated a mobile offline gmail prototype using HTML5 around the beginning of 2009, so the delay is hard to justify on a technical basis.
One wonders if they haven't made a policy decision not to support offline gmail - to force you to use the online, ad-containing version. If that is true, it would be yet another straw on the back of the "don't be evil" camel.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
event the iphone app is just a front for the website. For Google Reader I use MobileRSS that downloads the first few lines of my feeds so i can read them offline in the NYC subway.
Everything you'd tried to apply some whale meme anaolgy to is wrong
Hey! Quit bashing WellThoughtOutAnalogyGuy!
which is totally what she said
Come to the Dark Side of the Force.
It's got nothing to do with "tags", the whole point of the HTML5 API is to try and evolve the request -> response model we have at the moment. for example, WebSockets http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ event based full duplex communications. Or that you can now actually store files locally (applicationCache), so for example client side templates would be possible, only send the data that changes, not as happens now, everything over, and over again. The new tags in HTML5 are not the important bits.
I had poor luck successfully using Google Docs offline, even though this was supposedly what Gears was made for. I still do find Gears useful for one thing - Wordpress. I obviously can't blog offline, and if I were writing a post offline I'd do it in Microsoft Live Writer or MS Word or something, but regardless, that's not how Wordpress uses Gears; it leverages Gears to cache common Javascript files locally so that the pages on the admin console load much more quickly. This makes complex procedures really painless - like when I have to switch between many pages on the admin console, such as when I'm tweaking a series of templates or testing incremental changes to a plugin.
I'm no web designer so perhaps I'm misunderstanding TFA, but is offline script caching one of the features of HTML5? I really love this feature for frequently viewed web apps.
shift gear
So now, with a browser having 100% perfect Acid 3 score even on mobile/ARM flavor, I should be able to use Google sites in their full function not missing a single feature, no quirks, no "browser.js" hacks.
Basically I should be able to use Opera 10.10 and I shouldn't be thinking a second about Google Chrome which wasn't released for PowerPC anyway.
Somehow, I have hard time believing that.
Pushing functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting means longer launch times, more failure points, and more disparate functionality from browser to browser for developers to consider.
...and interactive sites that don't require a whole page load every time you want to change the tiniest thing. Yeah, so they're harder to develop (unless you're one of the 99.9% of web programmers who use a library to handle the differences) but I can live with that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'd been toying with the idea of making my existing webapp available offline, and just this morning began reading up on Google Gears to use it. I put the documentation down for a minute to check out /. and what do I see? Well, fuck.
I agree, that's why Flash is such a great idea. Instead of browser developers being bogged down fixing its multitude of problems, they just have to pester Adobe for a few years.
Seriously though, Adobe just announced that while Flash on Windows will support GPU acceleration, the OS X version will not (and I suspect neither will the Linux version). Adobe might take years to add a feature that Apple have already implemented for Safari's HTML engine (using the Quicktime library). Scripting means a single point of closed source failure.
We're using Wave for planning and collaboration on a number of projects. It's pretty cool, and some of my friends have already basically abandonned e-mail in favour of Wave. You just need enough invites to get all of your friends on there (which works quite well if you have less than about 20 friends :-).
The couple of times I looked into Gears, the main feature touted by Google was the ability to use your web apps when you're not connected to the internet. This was reason enough for me not to spend a lot of energy on Gears, as in practice, in this day and age, I never find a computer that is NOT connected to the internet.
So in short, I've never had a need for Gears.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
Cheers for the heads up. re: "with:public"
I got my invite last week and was surprised at the lack of supporting websites. The three automatically added contacts aren't interested in playing, so it's been a no-go for me so far.
I have a ton of invites (sixteen) if anyone wants one. Those who understand spamgourmet should have no problem emailing me.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
We don't even imply that MS had any original ideas around here.
Hey if your going to mock, do it correctly. Need to output an integer? Use assembly instruction code to write to hard-coded address. Done.
The problem is the "evolve" part. The current request->response model doesn't really work for web apps. An HTML5 "bag on the side" isn't a good solution.
??? things do "evolve", so I don't get your point. So how else should we do it?
No. This is essentially an extension of the cookie.
The web has changed. I don't like a lot of the changes, but this is one of the good ones. Actually, most of HTML5 is a great idea. Would you rather rely on Quicktime and Flash to do everything in the standard? I sure don't.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
From what I understood, Gears was the primary reason a computer with chrome OS is somewhat more useful than a brick when offline. Does this mean they'll have to allow real local applications for chrome OS now?
It's not going to happen, but the better solution is to design a new set of standards and protocols that include web apps capability as a first class design goal.
This isn't true insofar as it is relevant to the issue at hand, and isn't relevant so far as it is true. First, HTML5 local storage doesn't push "functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting"; the browser functionality relies on JavaScript scripting. Second, because it pushes local storage for which there are demands and existing, but not common, implementations (like Gears) into a standard form (HTML5), it reduces disparate functionality among browsers.
Cool, here you go.
Breakfast served all day!
One of the more overlooked features of Gears is its JavaScript parser, which allows apps to execute JavaScript in a separate thread from the rest of the page to improve performance. Now that Google has released Chrome, it makes less sense for it to keep working on a hack to allow Firefox and IE to run JavaScript more efficiently. Chrome is incentive enough for Mozilla and Microsoft to start doing that for themselves.
Breakfast served all day!
Which part of this is it that Google != do no evil?
me.bows_down_to(Google)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Gears went out of favor after Babbage's Difference Engine.
Have gnu, will travel.
Pushing functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting means longer launch times, more failure points, and more disparate functionality from browser to browser for developers to consider.
What utter bullshit. HTML5 doesn't "push functionality [from scripts] into the browser", it provides standards and functionality that cannot be provided in scripts. Scripts can't do video decoding. Scripts can't do geolocation. Scripts can't create a canvas. Scripts can't even provide new input element types (they can do the validation, but they can't communicate portably to the browser what it is they are doing).
It's a fountain of whale guts, metaphorically speaking.
Your brain is whale guts, metaphorically speaking.