Admittedly, Gears never worked very well--at least when it came to Gmail. The biggest problem I had over and over again was that Gears would be too eager, and would switch me to offline working when the connection wasn't too good. Sometimes I briefly checked Gmail to see if I had any new messages, and quit thinking I didn't, but later found-out I'd never actually gone online. However, these were teething troubles that could have been worked out.

According to Google, the solution is HTML5, which is starting to sound like the world's greatest panacea. Everything will be better when HTML5 arrives! Offline cloud storage! Web apps galore! ! No more Flash plug-in!

Except precious little of it is here right now.

According to Boodman, Google's been working "with our friends at Mozilla and Microsoft" to implement a couple of application programmer interfaces (APIs) that should allow the same functionality as Gears within HTML5.

Gears was only ever a temporary measure but its death feels just a little bit premature. Shouldn't the bullet have been put in the gun when Mozilla, Microsoft and others already had well-established offline systems in place?