Before Chrome, I was a heavy Safari user. I'm rather happy that they are shifting resources away from Gears towards standard compliance. Then maybe those who need the power of Gears can stop running Safari in 32-bit mode. I'm also excited about what this means for offline GMail and Mailplane.<p>Gears Team Blog post on the matter: <a href="http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html" rel="nofollow">http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html</a>
This is a good move just because there is so much confusion caused by Gears existing. People seem to be going out of their way to misunderstand that Gears is implementing bleeding edge HTML5 features in a way that can be added to other browsers.<p>The only browser that needs such a plugin is IE, and Chrome frame now fills that same gap.