Google has admitted that it is no longer developing its Gears browser plug-in. Instead, it will focus efforts on HTML5, which it says will accomplish much of the same functionality that Gears made possible.I was a big fan of Google Gears. I used it for a number of my Google services, including Gmail. Ever since I upgraded my computer system software to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, I haven't been able to use Gears. I've missed it a lot. Why? Google hasn't created a Snow Leopard-compatible version of Gears yet...and it never will.

Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google, told PC Magazine in an interview, "We are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears]. We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don't want to break anything out there."

Instead, Google plans to focus on HTML5. Upson explains, "We're very focused on moving HTML5 forward, and that's where we're putting all of our energy. When we started the Gears project, we did it because we couldn't get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications. So we said, okay, we'll build a plugin that could do it. And lo and behold, once we shipped Gears, suddenly the browser vendors got very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications. And so, I think Gears has accomplished its mission very well, in getting these capabilities into HTML 5. In fact, the team that designed Gears was also instrumental in designing the HTML 5 versions of those APIs. You can almost think of what's in HTML 5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2, and that's how we view it."

In addition to not supporting Snow Leopard, the current pre-beta version of Chrome for Mac OS fails to include native Gears integrated, which would seem a no-brainer. Upson didn't explain if or how HTML 5 will play a role in providing features that some users expect with the new browser. The beta release of Chrome for Mac OS is due before the end of 2009.