Word from the LA Times is that Google plans to phase out its Gears plug-in in favor of HTML5 when it comes to augmenting browser abilities. The precise details of its enthusiasm for the plug-in aren't clear yet, but the general trajectory is no surprise.
Google, along with Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and some other allies, has been agitating for features that can make browsers and the Web into a more powerful foundation for Web sites and Web applications. Gears was an early Google effort in this area.
But Gears emerged in 2007--back before Google released a browser of its own, before the World Wide Web Consortium had put its full weight behind HTML5, before HTML5 had gotten the traction it now enjoys as an official standard in the making, and before Microsoft took interest in contributing to that standard.
It's clear things are different now, and HTML5 is solving the same problems Gears set out to fix, and a healthy cooperation is under way for future Web standards work.
Linus Upson, Google's engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, confirmed Tuesday that Gears will be supported but isn't an active area of development.
"This isn't an area we've been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We're very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible," Upson said. "Gears applications will run well for the foreseeable future," though, he added.
Browsers including Safari and Chrome are picking up HTML5 versions of Gears features now, he said, and Web applications will follow suit. "I would think over course of next year or so you'll see many more applications take advantage of those abilities," he said.
Perhaps the most notable Gears feature is the ability to store data on a PC so a Web application could work even when disconnected from the network--Gmail and Google Docs being the biggest examples. But that's solved by the local database work in HTML5 that's now arriving in browsers. HTML5 also provides for interfaces with files for better uploading geolocation to let a Web site make use of a person's location.
Various HTML5 elements are just beginning to arrive in Web browsers, and widely used browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 don't have any support at all. But the difficulties of getting people to install Gears or other plug-ins means that built-in browser support probably will reach more people sooner than Gears.
Google has given plenty of signals it's happy to direct Gears energy into HTML5. It proudly demonstrated offline Gmail using HTML5 storage last May at its Google I/O conference, for example. And regarding its O3D and Native Client plug-ins, which accelerate 3D and regular computing processes in a browser, Google developers have argued such technology should be built into the browser, not handled as a separate plug-in.
Google's official position, quoted in the LA Times, is as follows: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their Web sites...We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
It was clear from talks at Google I/O that Google sees as a proving ground to try to advance Web technologies and counts it as a victory when Gears technology arrives in HTML5. Now the only real question in my mind is whether the pace of HTML5 development in the standards world will satisfy Google.
Upson said Google will continue adding features into Chrome and its Chrome OS, even if that means deviating from standards at times.
"Ideally for all these things (such as Native Client and O3D) we'd like to get them into standards," Upson said. "At the end of the day, we can't control the pace of the Internet Explorer developer team at Microsoft (or developer teams) at Mozilla and Apple. We all have a shared incentive to not fragment the Web, but there always will be seams that aren't smooth."
Updated at 5:14 p.m. PST with comment from Google.
iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google's Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.
Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto's purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.
"We're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears," the company said on an explanatory Web site. "If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster."
Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it--among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace--are the exception rather than the rule.
Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto's financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto's chief operating officer.
"It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let's face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more," Thompson said. "Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I'll save on bandwidth."
The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. "We did this on our own," with Web programmers jumping on the project because "it's sexy for them to work on it."
iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests--and that's with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a "tiny portion of our traffic," he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock's Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.
The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients--photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users' hard drives don't get too cluttered.
"It's a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly," Thompson said. One of his developers described it as "the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn't free, (but) every subsequent hit is."
Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.
HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems' Flash technology.
"We'd love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it's probably a ways out," Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.
IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it's still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.
People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson's taste--or plans.
"We announced we'd drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I'm not sure we're going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping--just not quite fast enough," he said.
From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.
(Credit: Net Applications)According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.
iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple's Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google's Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.
Among iStockphoto's IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.
"We've seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We're hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly," Thompson said. "For us, even though it's a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can't cut them off at the knees."
"I think we're dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise--not to mention we're 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place" among operating systems, Thompson said.
For those who use Firefox 3.5 but also want to use Gmail with no network connection, Google has an answer: a new version of its Gears plug-in.
Gears endows browsers with some new abilities, including accessing some Web applications even while a computer is offline and juggling multiple simultaneous tasks more effectively. And using Gears, Google last week began letting people see their location on Google Maps by clicking the small circle below the navigation controller and above the zoom controller.
Major updates to Mozilla's open-source browser often break add-on compatibility, and the earlier version of Gears wouldn't work with the newly released Firefox 3.5. The new Gears 0.5.29.0 fixes that.
Users of Mac OS X and Windows can click the "install" button at Google's Gears Web site. The new version is spreading to Mozilla's add-on site, too.
As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google's online tools a bit more competitive for business users.
The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.
The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.
Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google's Offline Calendar FAQ page.
As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person's computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.
"Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon," according to the FAQ.
Update 8:46 a.m. PST: Google confirmed it's begun activating the offline support. It will be available for customers using the free, ad-supported Standard Edition of Google Apps and the Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year, Google said.
Update 8:59 a.m. PST: Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager, discussed the offline Calendar move at the Google Enterprise blog.
Google declined to say when read-write access will arrive or when offline calendars will arrive for ordinary Google Calendar users. "We've seen the strongest interest in this feature from our enterprise users, so we're bringing it to them first," spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.
Wondering how Gmail offline works? Here, we walk you through it.
In short, people familiar with Gmail already are mostly familiar with its offline incarnation, which Google said it's releasing gradually to its users in coming days. The biggest difference is of course that you can't see new messages, and e-mails that you send are merely queued up until they can be delivered when a network connection is re-established.
Gmail uses Google's Gears technology, which among other things lets browsers store data on a computer in what's called a local cache. I'm using Firefox 3.1 beta 2, with which Gears isn't compatible, so to access Gmail offline I used Google Chrome instead, which has Gears built in. Since Gears is a relative rarity, though, most folks will have to install it first, which Google walks you through.
There are some limitations to offline Gmail: Only about 10,000 messages will be downloaded--the newest and most recently used. You can't use the contacts tab to manage your connections, though e-mail address autocomplete works so you won't need to worry about remembering e-mail addresses. You can't include attachments on new messages. It's only available in Gmail for English speakers.
But overall, it's certainly worth it if you're ever on a plane, taxi, train, vacation retreat, or coffee shop with an overstressed connection.
... Read more
Yahoo has improved its BrowserPlus technology for more sophisticated Web applications and now lets other Web sites besides its own use it, the company said.
BrowserPlus, like Google's Gears, is software that can be plugged into a person's Web browser to make Web-based applications work more like native desktop programs.
One key feature, for example, is a better upload interface that gets around the tedious requirement at most Web sites that people individually select each photo, video, or other file to be uploaded. Another is desktop notifications, letting a Web-based e-mail, calendar, or instant messaging application notify a person of a new message or event reminder, for example.
Yahoo debuted BrowserPlus in May, but it released a new version quietly on Friday. New features include some ability to store data on the user's computer, which also is one of Gears' big selling points, and "playful support for motion sensors...on specific laptops," Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo's BrowserPlus team said in a blog posting Monday.
Yahoo apparently is hoping the features will increase adoption of the software. "It makes it possible for anyone to use BrowserPlus on their own Web site to implement better in-browser uploading and desktop notifications," Hilaiel said. Previously, BrowserPlus only would work with sites such as Yahoo's Flickr.
The company also bills BrowserPlus as a desirable plug-in framework: once users have it installed, people can let Web sites add new abilities to their browsers without having to restart their browsers. Right now, though, only Yahoo may supply the plug-ins.
Current BrowserPlus plug-ins include features to enable image editing, drag-and-drop operations, PStore for storing data, and an interface for an operating system's text-to-speech engine.
Because BrowserPlus, like Gears, is a narrowly used project, Web site designers can't count on it being installed, but they can offer some new features to people who do have it running.
Those who want to try it out can check Yahoo's BrowserPlus developer site, also newly launched.
Google has updated its open-source Gears project so Web sites can take advantage of location services in Gears-enabled Web browsers.
The underlying technology, which used signals from cell phone towers, was initially developed so mobile-phone users could get a rough fix on their location, even without GPS technology. Now, though, Gears has been augmented with location smarts based on signals from Wi-Fi networks so that people with laptops also can figure out their location to within about 200 meters in many major cities.
That means that a Web site that might benefit from showing a person's location--most anything mapping-related, for example--can be personalized better, as long as there are wireless network signals around. Google uses Gears to try to advance the Web application state of the art, but only a small fraction of users have it installed.
Also, programmers don't need to know which underlying mechanism provides the service. "Because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop and mobile browsers, you can even use the same code on both platforms," Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google mobile team, said in the Google Code Blog post Tuesday.
Gears is an extension that augments the ability of Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari. But it's not the only way to get geographic information into a browser.
Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user's location. That service is being built into Firefox 3.1, too, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS or presumably Gears, to retrieve location information.
Sharing one's location information with Web sites, of course, raises privacy concerns, but as with Mozilla's Firefox extension, those sites must obtain explicit information.
"Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time, and the user can either allow or deny your site permission," Wiles said.
Update 12:33 p.m. PDT: The Wi-Fi location feature also is now built into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps for Mobile, according to Google's Mobile blog.
"The premise is similar to what we do with cell tower information: information transmitted by nearby Wi-Fi access points is used to pinpoint your location," said Adel Youssef and Arunesh Mishra, programmers for Google mobile. "Since the range of a Wi-Fi access point is smaller than that of a cell phone tower, this often results in a much more accurate position."
Zoho Mail, out of private beta testing, works on the Apple iPhone.
(Credit: Zoho)Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple's iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.
The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications' limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.
Offline access, which in Zoho's case is enabled with Google's Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. "Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox," the company said Friday in an announcement.
Easier said than done, perhaps: I just got an indefinite "Loading..." message in both Google Chrome and in Gears-enabled Firefox when trying to access my mail after I shut off my network.
(Update 10:30 a.m. PDT: I thought I'd gone through the offline settings properly, but evidently I hadn't. It does in fact work, mostly, caching messages on my PC and automatically adapting according to whether there's a network. I could write new mails, though Zoho Mail only saves them to the draft folder instead of queuing them up to be sent. And when I tried to reply to an e-mail, I got the error message, "Sorry, this feature is not supported while you are offline!")
And mobile support, while difficult given the primitive state of most mobile devices' Web browsers, can also help when people don't have access to a PC or a Wi-Fi network. "We do plan to support other mobile devices soon," Zoho said. The application worked fine on my iPhone.
Zoho Mail can be accessed with other e-mail clients using the POP (Post Office Protocol) today; the more powerful IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support is "coming soon."
It has no storage limits or ads. Users can opt to organize mail with either labels, a la Gmail, or Folders, a la Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And back-and-forth exchanges can be viewed either with Outlook's conventional style or Gmail's conversation view. Also adopted are some Outlook keyboard shortcuts, such as Control-Enter to send a message. The application worked for me, though I missed Yahoo Mail's drag-and-drop abilities and Gmail's stand-out filtering options.
People who sign up for the e-mail get a "username@zoho.com" e-mail address. And through the AdventNet subsidiary's business offering, customers can use Zoho Mail with their own domain.
Zoho's Web-based e-mail client uses Google's Gears to enable offline access to messages. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET News)My laptop's wireless 3G connection has been crapping out for over a week now. It works for a while, and then it quits. I don't know why. I don't know when it will be fixed, if ever.
I only know that when I'm on the road, I've got no way to get work done. While I wrestle with AT&T's alleged support services, I'm stuck in the breakdown lane of the old info highway.
I need access to Gmail and a half-dozen other sites, but for now I'll have to settle for stale Google Reader news feeds and my Google Docs files, plus a handful of other Web apps. These are the only sites I can access offline via Google Gears, a technology that lets Gears-enabled Web sites store information on your hard drive. That way, you can use the services even when your Internet link has gone south. Or at least that's the idea. In reality, you're still out of touch.
At present, Gears works with with Google Docs but not Spreadsheets or Presentations. You can view your Google Reader feeds offline, but you can't get to your Gmail in-box or Google Calendar. Other sites that are said to support Gears are the WordPress blogging system, ZohoWriter word processor, and Remember the Milk info manager.
I tried Gears with both Google Docs and Google Reader. The first time you visit Google Docs after you install Gears, you see a link labeled Offline in the top-right corner of the screen. Click it to open the Gears warning. After you allow the service to store information on your PC, the sync begins.
The first time you activate Google Reader's offline mode, you're asked to give the service permission to store files on your PC.
(Credit: Google)The initial sync can take a few minutes, but the process is faster subsequently. The green check mark in the top-right of the Google Docs window indicates that you're online. Click it and then click Settings to view your offline options.
The top button in the resulting dialog box simply puts a shortcut on your desktop. The second button lets you disable the offline feature. There are also two links in the dialog: the top link opens a simple information page, while the bottom link displays technical information about the sync, including the files you've downloaded.
Google Docs lets you access online files without a network link via the Google Gears technology.
(Credit: Google)You'll find more information about using Gears for offline access at the Google Docs help site. Note that even though Google Spreadsheets is said not to work with Gears, my online spreadsheets were downloaded just the same.
Google Reader's offline feature works a little differently. After you install Gears, you'll see a green arrow icon in the top-right corner of the Reader window. The downward arrow indicates that you're online. Click it to see a pop-up asking for permission to download data.
After you click Allow, the items in your feeds will be downloaded to your PC. The green downward arrow becomes a blue upward arrow, which means you're in Reader's offline mode. Click the arrow icon again to return to online mode.
It's nice to be able to access online files and news feeds without an Internet link, but what I really need is ubiquitous network access, which is what I thought I was getting with my 3G data link. Wireless data services simply aren't reliable, and offline browsing is no substitute for real-time access to e-mail and Web sites.
Maybe someday Google's new patent will be able to improve the situation. Or maybe WiMax will finally be ready for prime time.
All I know is, what we have now just won't do.
Google has finally made the Safari-friendly version of Gears available. Savvy Mac users could have downloaded and installed a rougher version of it as early as three weeks ago, however only Monday did the company announce a new version that's been readied for mass consumption.
Like its predecessor, the Mac version of Gears requires version 3.1.1 or higher of Safari, or version 1.5 or higher of Firefox, along with a machine running the most recent build of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5.3 (Leopard). It offers the same offline-goodness as its Windows counterpart, which is to say you'll get limited offline file access and optimization on the handful of Web applications that support it.
Interestingly enough, you're still unable to use Gears on the Windows version of Safari. Google must have hedged development on the fact that most Mac users are using Safari by default, whereas it's one of the trailing choices for Windows users; at least those who were smart enough to uncheck that install button in the Apple updater that comes with iTunes.
Back in December 2007 we predicted that "you'll be seeing Gears as a standard part of new Web apps in 2008." To a certain extent we've gotten a little bit closer to that with big-name services like WordPress and MySpace getting on board with limited Gears support. That said, the platform is still young, and the latest version--0.4 is still tacking on new features such as geo-locational awareness that can significantly change how much complexity developers choose to add to their online applications.
