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What is Googling Gearing Up For?

All 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 this. On his personal blog, Gears developer Dion Almaer spills the beans on the sprawling array of services they are planning to roll out.

Remember the rumored GBrowser? Well it looks like Google decided instead to build a stack of web application-focused services that run in a range of browsers using plugins or ActiveX. After all, why buy the cow when you can have the milk from all the cows for free? From where I’m sitting this was a very smart decision. Even Google doesn’t have the market power to impose a new browser brand on the world, so supporting third-party browsers is a reality that it has done well to embrace.

Most significant may be the mooted Desktop Shortcut API. Right now this creates a shortcut that runs in the browser that created it, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine it launching a standalone browsing process of some sort in the future. This would put Google smack dab in the middle of the site-specific browser game. Note also that the createShortcut function is attached to a Desktop class which is positively screaming to be the beneficiary of new desktop integration functionality in the future.

Does this mean that Google is rejecting nascent web standards like those of the WHAT WG? Someone pointed out to me that Ian Hickson, the brains behind WHAT WG and the Acid web compatibility tests, is a Google employee. You can hardly blame them for forging their own path, however, considering the frustration inherent in most standardization efforts. My guess is that they’re planning to fold their work into WHAT WG at some point in the future, but they don’t want that to slow them down.