Google Gears

History [edit]

Offline, in 2007

Google announced Gears at its Developer Day on 31 May 2007, released under a BSD licence. It was a plugin, which browsers of the time still needed for anything ambitious, and it added four things the web could not otherwise do.

A Database module, backed by SQLite, so an application could store real structured data on your machine. A WorkerPool, so JavaScript could run in the background without freezing the page, which is what Web Workers later became. A LocalServer, which cached an application's files and served them when there was no connection, which is what Service Workers later became. A Desktop module for shortcuts and file handling. Geolocation was added afterwards, and became the browser geolocation API.

Every one of those is now a web standard. In 2007 none of them were.

Everybody used it

Gmail, Google Docs, Reader, Calendar, YouTube, Picasa for mobile and Google Wave all used Gears, and so did MySpace Mail Search, Zoho Office and Remember The Milk. WordPress 2.6 added support to make its admin interface faster.

For a while, "works offline" on the web meant "install Gears".

Standardised, then removed

The reason Gears was a plugin is the reason it had to end. Google's own position was that these capabilities belonged in browsers rather than in an add-on, and it worked to put them into HTML5. As that happened, Gears became a duplicate.

Google stopped developing it in 2010, pointed developers at the HTML5 equivalents, and confirmed the end in a November 2011 post listing products being cleaned up. Support came out of Chrome the same year.

It is one of the few entries in this encyclopedia where the shutdown counts as success. Gears set out to prove the web should be able to work without a connection. It won that argument so completely that it made itself unnecessary.