Original author(s) | Developer(s) Google | |
Initial release May 31, 2007; 9 years ago (2007-05-31) Stable release 0.5.36.0 (February 22, 2010; 7 years ago (2010-02-22)) [±] Development status Discontinued (see End of life section) Operating system | ||
Gears, formerly Google Gears, was software offered by Google. According to the claims of the manufacturing company it "enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to the web browser. It allows some online files to be used offline". Released under the BSD license, Gears is free and open source software.
Contents
In late November 2009, numerous online news sources reported that Google was going to migrate to Web Storage rather than use Gears in the future. A Google spokesman later clarified that Google would, however, continue to support Gears so as not to break sites using it. On 22 November 2011, Google announced that on 1 December 2011, Gears support would be removed from Gmail and Google Calendar. Gears was removed from Google Chrome stable on June 7, 2011.
Components
There are several major API components to Gears:
Support
Several web applications from a variety of companies have used Gears at some point, including Google (Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Reader, Picasa for mobile, Calendar, Wave), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho Office Suite, Remember The Milk, and Buxfer. WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits. However, after Google announced in February 2010 that there would be no further development of Gears (see End of life section), several of these applications have discontinued their support for Gears, including Google Reader and WordPress
Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported, by using a Greasemonkey user script one of the Gears engineers has created.
Gears is supported on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP, Vista, and Seven, Internet Explorer Mobile 4.01 and later on Windows Mobile, Safari 3.1.1 and later on Mac OS X 10.4 and later (though not with Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.6; with no sign of a fix anytime soon), and Firefox 1.5 and later on multiple platforms. There is only limited 64 bit support from third parties.
Gears does not support attachment files with sizes greater than 2 GB under Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard currently due to a bug in the Blob handling code.
On May 29, 2008, Opera Software ASA announced that Opera Mobile 9.5 would support Gears. The technology preview release of the browser was published on February 20, 2009. It is currently available for touch-screen devices on Windows Mobile 5 & 6 only. Gears was not built into browsers other than Google Chrome and must be downloaded separately.
The Ruby on Rails framework supports interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.
End of life
On February 19, 2010, the Gears team at Google announced that the development of Google Gears had stopped, as they are working on bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. Although development of new features has ceased, Google is planning to continue supporting Gears until they have developed a "simple, comprehensive" method for users' data to be migrated to HTML5 features. Google Gears was removed from the Google Chrome stable on June 7, 2011.