Google Gears and Its Direction

Many have misconceptions towards what Google Gears is all about. When Google Gears was first introduced around one and a half year ago, many including myself thought purpose of Gears is to enable offline capabilities of web. However, if one were to venture to Gears website, it says otherwise. The overall goal of Gears is to make your web applications run as if you are running desktop apps.

From Gears website,

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

Google Gears
http://gears.google.com/

A Fresh Look At Google Gears
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/04/AR2008100400669.html