Google Gears
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| Original author(s) | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | |
| Initial release | May 31, 2007 |
| Stable release | 0.5.36.0 (February 22, 2010) |
| Development status | Discontinued (see End of life section) |
| Operating system | Windows XP, Vista, 7, Windows Mobile 5, 6, Mac OS X, Linux 32 bit |
| License | Open source (BSD) |
| Website | gearsblog |
Gears, formerly Google Gears, was software offered by Google. According to the claims of the manufacturing company it "enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to the web browser. It allows some online files to be used offline". Released under the BSD license, Gears is free and open source software.
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. On 22 November 2011, Google announced that on 1 December 2011, Gears support would be removed from Gmail and Google Calendar. Gears was removed from Google Chrome stable on June 7, 2011.
There are several major API components to Gears:
Several web applications from a variety of companies have 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.WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits. 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 have discontinued their support for Gears, including Google Reader and WordPress
Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported, by using a Greasemonkey user script one of the Gears engineers has created.
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