The promise of HTML 5 brings with it widespread ramifications. Not the least of these is its effect on Google products. If you use Google Gears, and especially if you're thinking about using Google's new Chrome OS when it comes out, you need to keep reading.
Back in 2007, Google released Gears -a free, open source software that according to Google "enables more powerful web applications by adding new features to your web browser." The software, which is still being used today, has quite a few components.
These components include a database module capable of storing data locally; a WorkerPool module that provides parallel execution of JavaScript code; a LocalServer module that caches and serves application resources such as HTML, images, and JavaScript, among other things; a desktop module that enables web applications to interact more naturally with the desktop; and lastly, a geo-location module that enables web applications to detect the geographical location of their users. Basically, once a user downloads Gears on to their computer they can utilize helpful features such as offline e-mail caching and drag-and-drop file uploading.
As mentioned previously, the software was released in 2007. Though three years isn't a very long time for a majority of us, it's ages in the technology world.
Perhaps that's why there have been recent rumblings in the blogosphere that Google already plans to ditch Gears and instead, migrate towards using HTML5, which is the latest revision of the standard programming language (HTML) that powers the Internet. Whether or not this is true is still unknown, but there's a lot to discuss when it comes to Google's Chrome Operating System and the possibility of the tech giant utilizing HTML 5.
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