On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:
What about Google Gears? Yeah, it's Google, but GG supports a variety of browsers and we wouldn't have to wait for M$ to support it properly in IE 20.
IE8b2 already supports localStorage, from what I've heard, more or less according to spec. The problem is legacy browsers. These will have to be handled somehow regardless of whether people install Gears, since we can't expect many people to install Gears. The extra effort to implement three different ways of doing things (localStorage + Gears + legacy fallback) isn't worth it: the number of people with Gears but not localStorage is probably very small.
Since Gears is open-source, there should be no principled problem with using it. (I'm not sure why you think anyone would object on the basis that Google makes it -- would you expect objections to use of MySQL or Java because Sun makes those, or YUI because Yahoo! makes it?) But pragmatically, I doubt it has enough market adoption to be worth supporting.