Gears, formerly Google Gears,
is a discontinued
utility software
Utility software is a program specifically designed to help manage and tune system or application software. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that b ...
offered by
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
to create more powerful
web apps by adding offline storage and other additional features to
web browsers
A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application 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 scree ...
. 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 lic ...
, Gears is
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
. Gears was conceived at a time when a comparable alternative was not available. However, Gears was discontinued in favor of the standardized
HTML5
HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...
methods that eventually became prevalent.
Components
There were several major
API
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
components to Gears:
*A Database module (powered by
SQLite
SQLite ( "S-Q-L-ite", "sequel-ite") is a free and open-source relational 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 ...
), which could store data locally.
*A WorkerPool module, which provided parallel execution of
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
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 the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...
,
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
,
Docs,
Reader,
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 ...
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 calendar date, date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is ...
,
Wave
In physics, mathematics, engineering, and related fields, a wave is a propagating dynamic disturbance (change from List of types of equilibrium, equilibrium) of one or more quantities. ''Periodic waves'' oscillate repeatedly about an equilibrium ...
),
MySpace
Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...
(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 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 user script that one of the Gears engineers created.
Gears was supported on
Internet Explorer 6 and
8 on
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
,
Vista and
7;
Internet Explorer Mobile
Internet Explorer Mobile (formerly named Pocket Internet Explorer; later called IE Mobile) was a mobile version of Internet Explorer developed by Microsoft, based on versions of the MSHTML (Trident) layout engine. IE Mobile comes loaded by defa ...
4.01 and later on
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...
;
Safari 3.1.1 and later on
Mac OS X 10.4 and later (though not
Safari 4 on
Mac OS X 10.6);
Firefox 1.5 and later on multiple platforms; and the native browser on
BlackBerry OS
BlackBerry OS is a discontinued proprietary mobile operating system developed by Canadian company Research In Motion (now BlackBerry Limited) for its BlackBerry line of smartphone handheld devices. The operating system provides multitasking ...
5. 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
Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007, as the successor of Mac OS X Ti ...
or
Snow Leopard
The snow leopard (''Panthera uncia'') is a species of large cat in the genus ''Panthera'' of the family Felidae. The species is native to the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia. It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List because ...
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 Norway, Norwegian internet company which develops advertising and mobile software for operators, publishers and advertisers. It operates through its subsidiaries which include AdColony (fo ...
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 touchscreen devices running
Windows Mobile 5 and
6 only. Gears was not built into browsers other than
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a 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, iOS, iPadOS, an ...
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 web pa ...
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 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
HTML5
HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...
. 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
Gmail
Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...
and
Google Calendar.
Gears was removed from
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a 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, iOS, iPadOS, an ...
on June 7, 2011.
See also
*
Rich Internet application
*
Adobe AIR
Adobe AIR (also known as Adobe Integrated Runtime and codenamed Apollo) is a cross-platform runtime system currently developed by Harman International, in collaboration with Adobe Inc., for building desktop applications and mobile application ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gears (Software)
Discontinued Google software
Discontinued Mozilla plug-ins