Google drops gears

SEARCH OUTFIT Google is effectively dropping Google Gears development as it moves deeper into developing the W3C-backed HTML5.

In a blog post the firm said that it has "shifted" its efforts from developing Google Gears releases towards, "bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5." The firm is already a supporter of HTML5 so this will see it work even more closely with the web standard.

"We realise there is not yet a simple, comprehensive way to take your Gears-enabled application and move it (and your entire userbase) over to a standards-based approach. We will continue to support Gears until such a migration is more feasible, but this support will be necessarily constrained in scope," wrote Ian Fette of the Google Gears team in a blog post.

The firm seems to be acknowledging that at times it has found it hard to make its Gears merge with other technologies. Fette said that the firm was making progress with its plans, but said that this would not be without its casualties and compromises. Safari support for example, is outta there.

"We will not be investing resources in active development of new features. Likewise, there are some platforms that would require a significant engineering effort to support due to large architectural changes", he said. "Specifically, we cannot support Gears in Safari on OS X Snow Leopard and later. Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue."

We wish anyone currently developing for Gears good luck. You might face a few months of waiting while Google settles its own porting issues. Or you can just get on with working with the Chrome OS now. µ