| Gears | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | |
| Initial release | May 31, 2007; 18 years ago (2007-05-31) |
| Final release | 0.5.36.0 (February 22, 2010; 15 years ago (2010-02-22)[1]) [±] |
| Operating system | Windows XP,Windows Vista,Windows 7,Windows Mobile 5,Windows Mobile 6,macOS,Linux,BlackBerry OS 5 |
| License | BSD |
| Website | gears |
Gears, formerlyGoogle Gears,[2] is a discontinuedutility software offered byGoogle to create more powerfulweb apps by adding offline storage and other features toweb browsers.[3] Released under theBSD license,[4] Gears isfree and open-source. Gears was conceived at a time when a comparable alternative was not available. However, Gears was discontinued in favor of the standardizedHTML5 methods that eventually became prevalent.
There were several majorAPI components to Gears:
| Version | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1 | 2007-05-31 | Initial release as Google Gears.[10] |
| 0.2 | 2008-02-22[11] | |
| - | 2008-05-28[2] | Project renamed to Gears to reflect theopen source, collaborative nature of the project. |
| 0.3 | 2008-06-11[12] | Introduced ability to adddesktop icons, support forMozilla Firefox 3. |
| 0.4 | 2008-08-22[13] | GeolocationAPI / Event handling for upload / download transfer progress, localization in 40 languages |
| 0.5 | 2008-11-24[14] | UpdatedSQLite, Geolocation can now get data fromWiFi antennas, Improved API to manage data blobs on LocalServer |
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, andBuxfer.[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 (seeEnd 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 aGreasemonkey user script that one of the Gears engineers created.[19]
Gears was supported onInternet Explorer 6 and8 onWindows XP,Vista and7;Internet Explorer Mobile 4.01 and later onWindows Mobile;Safari 3.1.1 and later onMac OS X 10.4 and later[20] (though notSafari 4 onMac OS X 10.6[21]);Firefox 1.5 and later on multiple platforms; and the native browser onBlackBerry OS 5.[22] There was only limited 64-bit support from third parties.
Gears did not support attachment files with sizes greater than 2 GB underMac OS X Leopard orSnow Leopard due to a bug in the Blob handling code.[23][24]
On May 29, 2008,Opera Software ASA announced thatOpera 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 touchscreen devices runningWindows Mobile 5 and6 only.[27] Gears was not built into browsers other thanGoogle Chrome and had to be downloaded separately.
TheRuby on Rails framework supported interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.[28]
In late November 2009, numerous online news sources reported that Google was going to migrate toWeb 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 likeHTML5. 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 fromGmail andGoogle Calendar.[31] Gears was removed fromGoogle Chrome on June 7, 2011.[32]
