Gears (software)

Gears, formerly Google Gears,[2] is discontinued utility software offered by Google to create more powerful web apps by adding offline storage and other additional features to web browsers.[3] Released under the BSD license,[4] Gears is free and open-source. Gears was conceived at a time when a comparable alternative was not available. However, Gears was discontinued in favor of the standardized HTML5 methods that eventually became prevalent.

This article is about the Google software Gears. For other uses, see Gear (disambiguation).
Gears
Developer(s)Google
Initial releaseMay 31, 2007 (2007-05-31)
Final release0.5.36.0 (February 22, 2010 (2010-02-22)[1]) [±]
Operating systemWindows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 5, Windows Mobile 6, macOS, Linux
LicenseBSD
Websitegears.google.com

Components

There were several major API components to Gears:

  • A Database module (powered by SQLite), which could store data locally.[5]
  • A WorkerPool module, which provided parallel execution of JavaScript code.[6]
  • A LocalServer module, which cached and served application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.).[7]
  • A Desktop module, which let web applications interact more naturally with the desktop.[8]
  • A Geolocation module, which let web applications detect the geographical location of their users.[9]

Version history
VersionDateDescription
0.1 2007-05-31Initial release as Google Gears.[10]
0.2 2008-02-22[11]
- 2008-05-28[2] Project renamed to Gears to reflect the open source, collaborative nature of the project.
0.3 2008-06-11[12] Introduced ability to add desktop icons, support for Mozilla Firefox 3.
0.4 2008-08-22[13] Geolocation API / Event handling for upload / download transfer progress, localization in 40 languages
0.5 2008-11-24[14] Updated SQLite, Geolocation can now get data from WiFi antennas, Improved API to manage data blobs on LocalServer

Support

Several web applications from a variety of companies 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.[15] WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits.[16] 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 discontinued their support for Gears, including Google Reader[17] and WordPress[18]

Gears could be enabled on sites where it was otherwise unsupported, by using a Greasemonkey user script that one of the Gears engineers created.[19]

Gears was 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[20] (though not with Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.6[21]), and Firefox 1.5 and later on multiple platforms.[22] There was only limited 64 bit support from third parties.

Gears did not support attachment files with sizes greater than 2 GB under Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard due to a bug in the Blob handling code.[23][24]

On May 29, 2008, Opera Software ASA announced that Opera Mobile 9.5 would support Gears.[25] The technology preview release of the browser was published on February 20, 2009.[26] It was available for touch-screen devices on Windows Mobile 5 & 6 only.[27] Gears was not built into browsers other than Google Chrome and had to be downloaded separately.

The Ruby on Rails framework supported interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.[28]

End of life

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.[29] 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 had ceased, Google was planning to continue supporting Gears until they have developed a "simple, comprehensive" method for users' data to be migrated to HTML5 features.[30] On 22 November 2011, Google announced that on 1 December 2011, Gears support would be removed from Gmail and Google Calendar.[31] Gears was removed from Google Chrome on June 7, 2011.[32]

See also

References
  1. Revision: r3423
  2. "Happy birthday, Google Gears!". Official Google Blog. 2008-05-28. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
  3. "Gears". Retrieved 2008-09-01.
  4. "Google Code project for Gears". Retrieved 2008-02-26.
  5. "Database Module AI". Retrieved 2007-05-31.
  6. "WorkerPool Module API". Retrieved 2007-05-31.
  7. "LocalServer Module API". Retrieved 2007-05-31.
  8. "Desktop Module API". Retrieved 2007-05-31.
  9. "Geolocation Module API". Retrieved 2008-08-27.
  10. "Google Gears Could Revolutionize the Online User Experience". Computemagazine.com. 2009-05-28. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  11. "Gears API Blog: Gears 0.2 Released!". Gearsblog.blogspot.com. 2008-02-19. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  12. "Gears API Blog: Fly, Gears 0.3!". Gearsblog.blogspot.com. 2008-11-06. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  13. "Gears API Blog: Gears 0.4 is here!". Gearsblog.blogspot.com. 2008-08-22. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  14. "Google Developers". Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  15. "Gears History". Retrieved 2008-06-28.
  16. "WordPress Trac ticket - Gears Support".
  17. "Google Reader blog - end of offline support".
  18. "WordPress documentation - Tools Subpanel".
  19. "Gearsmonkey: Gears + Greasemonkey". Retrieved 2009-08-13.
  20. "Gears for Safari beta". Retrieved 2008-08-26.
  21. "Issue 847: Mac: Gears not working Safari 4 - Snow Leopard". Google Code. Retrieved 2009-09-05.
  22. Archived November 25, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  23. Reported by [email protected], Oct 21, 2009 (2009-10-21). "Issue 960 - gears - Appears to be a 2Gbyte limit on blob upload on Mac OS X Leopard - Improving Your Web Browser - Google Project Hosting". Retrieved 2013-06-16.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  24. "Issue 958 - gears - Appears to be a 2Gbyte limit on blob upload on Mac OS X Snow Leopard - Improving Your Web Browser - Google Project Hosting". 2009-10-19. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  25. "Opera extends Gears support". Opera Software. Retrieved 2008-05-29.
  26. "Technology preview: Gears-enabled Opera Mobile 9.5". Opera Software. Archived from the original on 2009-02-23. Retrieved 2009-02-21.
  27. "Gears-enabled Opera Mobile 9.51b2 download page". Opera Software. Retrieved 2009-02-21.
  28. "Google Gears Takes Ruby on Rails Offline". eWeek. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
  29. "What's powering Web apps: Google waving goodbye to Gears, hello to HTML5". Los Angeles Times. 2009-11-30. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
  30. "Hello HTML5".
  31. "Official Blog: More spring cleaning out of season". Googleblog.blogspot.com. 2011-11-22. Retrieved 2013-06-16.
  32. "Chrome Stable Release".
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