Gears, formerly Google Gears, is discontinued

utility software Utility software is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit or ...

offered by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

to create more powerful

web apps A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

by adding offline storage and other additional features to

web browsers A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. Released under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

, Gears is

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

. Gears was conceived at a time when a comparable alternative was not available. However, Gears was discontinued in favor of the standardized

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

methods that eventually became prevalent.

Components

There were several major API components to Gears: *A Database module (powered by

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the mo ...

), which could store data locally. *A WorkerPool module, which provided parallel execution of

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

code. *A LocalServer module, which cached and served application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.). *A Desktop module, which let web applications interact more naturally with the desktop. *A Geolocation module, which let web applications detect the geographical location of their users.

Version history

Support

Several web applications from a variety of companies used Gears at some point, including Google (

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

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Docs Docs may refer to: * Department of Community Services * Display Operator Console System, DOCS (software) package * Docs.com * Colloquial term for Dr. Martens footwear. * Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of ...

Reader A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to: Computing and technology * Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader * Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application * A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...

Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by I ...

for mobile,

Calendar A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a phy ...

Wave In physics, mathematics, and related fields, a wave is a propagating dynamic disturbance (change from equilibrium) of one or more quantities. Waves can be periodic, in which case those quantities oscillate repeatedly about an equilibrium (re ...

), MySpace (Mail Search),

Zoho Office Suite Zoho Office Suite is an Indian web-based online office suite containing word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, web conferencing, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, invoicing and othe ...

, 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 End-of-life may refer to: * End-of-life (product), a term used with respect to terminating the sale or support of goods and services * End-of-life care End-of-life care (EoLC) refers to health care provided in the time leading up to a person's dea ...

section), several of these applications discontinued their support for Gears, including Google Reader and WordPress. Gears could be enabled on sites where it was otherwise unsupported, by using a

Greasemonkey Greasemonkey is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension. It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmen ...

user script that one of the Gears engineers created. Gears was supported on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8 on

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, Vista, and 7, Internet Explorer Mobile 4.01 and later on

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

, Safari 3.1.1 and later on Mac OS X 10.4 and later (though not with Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.6), and Firefox 1.5 and later on multiple platforms. There was only limited 64 bit support from third parties. Gears did not support attachment files with sizes greater than 2 GB under

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due to a bug in the Blob handling code. On May 29, 2008,

Opera Software ASA Otello Corporation ASA (formerly Opera Software ASA) is a Norwegian internet company which develops advertising and mobile software for operators, publishers and advertisers. It operates through its subsidiaries which include AdColony (formerly ' ...

announced that Opera Mobile 9.5 would support Gears. The technology preview release of the browser was published on February 20, 2009. It was available for touch-screen devices on

Windows Mobile 5 Windows Mobile 5.0, originally codenamed "Magneto",De Herrera, Chris pocketpcfaq.com. Retrieved September 6, 2007. was released at Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference 2005 in Las Vegas, May 9–12, 2005. Microsoft offered mains ...

& 6 only. Gears was not built into browsers other than

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...

and had to be downloaded separately. The

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

framework supported interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.

End of life

In late November 2009, numerous online news sources reported that Google was going to migrate to

Web Storage Web storage, sometimes known as DOM storage ( Document Object Model storage), is a standard JavaScript API provided by web browsers. It enables websites to store persistent data on users' devices similar to cookies, but with much larger capa ...

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 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

. 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. On 22 November 2011, Google announced that on 1 December 2011, Gears support would be removed from

and

Google Calendar Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It became available in beta release April 13, 2006, and in general release in July 2009, on the web and as mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms. ...

. Gears was removed from

on June 7, 2011.

References

External links