I thought this was always the point of Gears, as a stopgap for HTML5 features until browsers supported them all. But I don't really see why they need Gears on Firefox for local storage for example, when Firefox has had a local storage API since version 2.<p>See <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Storage" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Storage</a><p>Of course, I am not really a web developer or a Google employee so I probably don't have the whole picture.<p>Oh, I guess the Firefox 2 storage isn't actually HTML5 storage, according to <a href="http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/html5.html#localstorage" rel="nofollow">http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/html5.html#localstorage</a> . But then, I don't quite understand where that lies in relation to HTML5.
There was a similar article based on (I think) the Mac chrome bug tracker. Basically Gears stopped working and the Google developer said, in the future they were supporting native HTML5.<p>This shouldn't be a surprise as in the past they've said Gears is just a way to get HTML5 into browsers that wouldn't otherwise support it.