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Google Says Bye to Gears from Chrome Browser and Stop Support

The history of Gears starts from 2007 where Google started it as an open project for browsers to bring some new features like what Yahoo intended with BrowserPlus. The features provided by Google Gears helped browsers to improve themselves. Google Gears make sure the web applications are more interactive with Desktop and store data locally in a fully searchable database. It lets JavaScript run in the background and it improved the overall performance. Some other features include geolocation of user (only with user permission), Dividing a larger file into smaller pieces and upload (blob) etc. Anyway now Google is saying goodbye to Google Gears as they are not going to release newer versions anymore.

Right now Google Gears support Firefox (Versions 1.5-3.6) and Internet Explorer (Version 6.0-8.0). The Operating Systems which support Gears are Android, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. MAC Snow Leopard and Linux. To check whether your browser is Gear installed, Go to the link below.

http://gears.google.com/

Here I have visited this web page with my browser. I checked it with Firefox browser and got the below message. The current version of gears installed is 0.5.33.0 and I am running 32 bit Windows Operating system on my laptop.
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One Google Representative said, they are about to put Gears in Trash and they are not going to support newer versions of major browsers. He pinpointed Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are not supported. With the fast release of newer versions by the Mozilla team, within months, it will be disappeared from the Firefox browser. Users with Internet Explorer may take time because of the slower update cycle by Microsoft. Google will remove Gears completely from Chrome when they release the Chrome 12 version. Within one year, it will disappear from most of the browsers installed. However, certain users who will run outdated versions of browsers will still use it.


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