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April 06, 2008
Gears adoption
Gears adoption: Harry McCracken of PC World is less optimistic now on Google Gears, because "There are still only a handful of Gears-powered offline services available... If Google Gears is a bandwagon it's one that almost nobody, including Google, has jumped on yet" [edited]. I don't think that's quite fair; Google Gears will necessarily have a different type of adoption rate than AIR. Google Gears is a browser plugin to add local relational database storage. It works with webpages, which must then (practically speaking) do browser-detection and gracefully degrade for Gears-less browsers. That's more work than just making an AIR interface available. An URL has different costs than an app. The Gears project is offering a way to bring deeper local data structures into consenting browsers, on the same webpages that people visit without Gears. It should naturally have a slower adoption rate than AIR, but it's still useful. Give it time.
Update: Apologies for the typo I originally added to Harry's name...!
Posted by JohnDowdell at April 6, 2008 10:58 PM
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