this is awesome news, the introduction of gears always worried my as it looked to be fighting web standards as opposed to leveraging them, nice to be proved wrong.
I wonder why gears wasnt initially a plugin that let you use html5 apis in browsers that didnt have support?
You've got it backwards, Gears was the zeroth version of the LocalStorage, Web Workers, and Geolocation APIs: HTML5 is based on it
It was always an experiment, a way to test this stuff out without putting it in Webkit or Gecko where people could depend on it. All of the APIs changed form when they were standardized, with some being abandoned (LocalServer and Desktop).
they arent ever set in stone, browsers can quite happily ignore web standards from time to time. Would have made upgrading from gears just happen by magic though.
I wonder why gears wasnt initially a plugin that let you use html5 apis in browsers that didnt have support?