In a , Aaron Boodman has officially announced the death of the Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-in that allowed users of compatible cloud apps to seamlessly store offline their cloud data (such as Gmail messages and Google Docs).

Gears has been in its death throes for some time----even though, back in 2007, PCWorld . And what about ?

The hand of the Gears team has been pretty much forced because of and , both of which will not be supported by the plug-in.

The good news is that the Gears code is integrated into Google Chrome and will stay there until version 12. (To utilize it for Gmail, click the Offline link within Gmail settings) The bad news is that, at the rate at which the Chrome team make new releases, it won't be very long until we reach Chrome 12. We came into 2011 using version 8, and versions 9 and almost within a month of each other.

Pity poor Mac and Linux Chrome users, by the way. For various reasons, Gears never made it into their versions of Chrome, so they've been unable to automatically backup offline for some time.