Comments on: Browser Trends: Offline Storage

By: Just Browsing » Browser Trends: Site-Specific Browsers

Just Browsing » Browser Trends: Site-Specific Browsers — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:45:15 +0000

[...] It’s also worth keeping an eye on Google Gears. Originally announced as a way to let web apps function without a live internet connection, it is being extended to support features like placing a shortcut to the application on the [...]

By: Just Browsing » Blog Archive » Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

Just Browsing » Blog Archive » Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:20:39 +0000

[...] has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). [...]

By: Just Browsing » Blog Archive » What is Googling Gearing Up For?

Just Browsing » Blog Archive » What is Googling Gearing Up For? — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:03:26 +0000

[...] the communication around Google Gears seems to center on its role in adding offline storage capabilities to the browser. In reality, Google’s vision for the product goes far beyond [...]

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:44:15 +0000

Since Microsoft doesn’t consider the WHATWG to be a “real” working group of any import, I really doubt they will go out of their way to implement anything from the WHATWG in IE8. That would be pretty out of character.

By: Bart

Bart — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:16:58 +0000

Limited persistent data in IE:

http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/persistence/userData_1.htm
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531424(VS.85).aspx

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:33:41 +0000

Peter,

I imagine that Google is feeling the tension between cooperating with the WHATWG standards effort and forging ahead on its own. This doesn’t imply any criticism of the WHATWG specifically, but the reality is that it’s much harder to innovate and move quickly inside an industry consortium than it is if you go it alone.

One would certainly hope that the two efforts will converge eventually, and the fact that Ian is a Google employee is a hopeful sign in that regard.

By: Peter Kasting

Peter Kasting — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:56:27 +0000

Note that Ian Hickson, the WHATWG chair and HTML5 spec editor, works here at Google and is in communication with the Gears team. I think your post implies more competition between Gears and the HTML5 spec than really exists — as far as I’m aware everyone involved wants the ultimate result to be a good, clean set of APIs usable by developers everywhere. There are simply different routes to get there. Real developer experience using Gears is informing the HTML5 spec.

Also note that Gears is more than just offline storage — among other things, it provides auto-syncing or resources into that offline storage, as well as background JS threads.