Google Gears lets web applications store data locally in the browser, making those applications available even when off-line. Almost a key requirement for people afraid to switch to Google Docs fearing they would be stuck to work on documents when on a airplane or when unable to go on-line.
Gears is a set of Javascript APIs to enable developers to write applications that can work off-line. See the demo below in London Developers Day.
TechCrunch wrote a detailed article, Get Ready For A New Platform War. Google Gears Drives Straight At Microsoft’s Profits, highlighting how Gears can be a bigger step in Google strategy to make the Web Browser the Universal Virtual Machine that makes the OS irrelevant. Google is specifying these features as part of HTML5, and meantime implements them as plugins of IE, Firefox or Safari.
“The specific features mostly came from the new HTML5 specifications that standards bodies had been spending years working on. Instead of waiting for them to hit production, Google simply implemented them as best they could by extending the browser through a plugin. They would sacrifice standards in the short-term (and essentially ‘figure it out later’) in order to bring their web applications up to a rich next-generation standard from where they could stand up to Flash and Silverlight.“
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