Chrome OS will rely on not-yet-finished HTML 5 spec for offline app access

Google Gears is dead it seems; long live HTML 5

By Source Seeker on Tue, 12/01/09 - 5:58pm.

When Google opened Chrome OS on November 19, the company promised that when the devices themselves ship, they will be able to access Web apps offline. Google was vague as to how this would be done, but most folks (including me) assumed that it would tap into the two-year-old project that Google had developed to do exactly that, Google Gears. Now Google is reportedly ditching Gears altogether and will use HTML 5 for offline app caching.

Mozilla says it already supports HTML 5's offline caching, even though the specification isn't finalized yet. So there's some hope that HTML 5 will be ripe and ready for Chrome OS when devices begin shipping, which is promised for late 2010. According to the blog Read, Write, Web, Gears actually recieved the death seal with Snow Leopard's release:

"Changes in the newest Mac OS and Safari 4 prevent Gears from running on some newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears."

When I think of HTML 5, I tend to think a standardizes rich client (perhaps making Flash and Silverlight obsolete). But, in addition to application caching, HTML 5 is is also gaining ever more features, some of which Google had embedded in Gears, such as a geolocation API for mobile apps. Given that Apple is not interested in giving Google's technology a foothold, particularly in the mobile market, Google's decision to scrap its own API and support the next HTML standard makes a lot of sense.

There's only one catch -- Google promised that Chrome OS devices will ship by the holiday season 2010. But the leader of HTML 5's development doesn't expect the spec to reach W3C Candidate status until 2012 (much less be finished). I can see how Google might not think that's a problem. As Mozilla is proving, many bits and pieces of HTML 5 will be ready for use before the full spec is final. (Chrome does support a little HTML 5, too, specifically the video and audio tags, which, I might add, are supported in Firefox 3.5, too). As HTML 5 is updated, and Chrome OS is revised, Google merely needs to push a new version out to Chrome OS devices on boot-up.

What could possibly go wrong?

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