Jon Simpson
Gears API Blog: Hello HTML5
Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such as the ability to offer offline access in GMail, to a large number of users. Long term, we expect that as browsers support an increasing amount of this functionality natively and as users upgrade to more capable browsers, applications will make a similar migration
GMail on the iPhone already uses a local datastore via HTML5, so it’d be nice to see this support in the desktop GMail web client. I could imagine Google have been waiting for a solid percentage of users to be running either Safari 4, Chrome or the latest Firefox, where there’s appropriate support. Offline GMail via Gears has never worked on Snow Leopard, and it seemed a bit hacky to have an external browser plugin before that…