Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. Puts It On Death Watch For Firefox And IE.

While digging through the Chromium forums back in November looking for clues about the then-unreleased Chrome for Mac beta, we stumbled on an interesting bit of information: Google was moving away from supporting Gears going forward. While this move was obvious for some given Google's heavy investment in HTML5, Google hadn't talked much about what would happen to their plug-in that allowed for things such as offline access to Gmail. They're talking now. In a post yesterday on the Gears API blog, Ian Fette from the Gears team comes right out and says it in his title: "Hello HTML5." Fette notes that the reason there haven't been many updates to Gears in the past several months is because the team has shifted its focus towards implementing the same features into Chrome through HTML5. So far, this includes Database API, workers, local storage, and web sockets. And soon, LocalServer API and Geolocation will be a part of Chrome as well, Fette notes. In essence, all of these features make Gears unnecessary — well, at least in Chrome, which Google obviously wants you to use.