Google Gears is a technology that allows you to use applications such as Google Documents and Gmail offline. If you want to continue typing but do not have an Internet connection, you can do so as in a word processor installed on your machine. Once saved, you can move that document or any document to any folder. Once you reconnect to the Internet, all changes will be synced to the online version of Google Docs.
In reality, Google will no longer use this technology. It’s the end of Google Gears. However, this does not mean that Google is going to stop this functionality. On the horizon is HTML5, which will provide a similar, if not better, use of this technology.
The big problem with Gears is that Google has to program it to work with all operating systems and all browsers to keep it working. It worked on Mac at one point, but with Snow Leopard there was a change that made Google Gears no longer work. It is not known whether this was intentional or not. On Linux, depending on if you were able to configure it, it might work, but sometimes it didn’t.
With HTML5, these processes will be integrated into the Chrome browser and there will be support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Since all operating systems and browsers will support HTML5, there is no possibility that developers or companies can disable these applications from Google.
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