At Google's developer day last week, we talked to VP of engineering Jeff Huber and product manager Sundar Pichai about Google Gears. With this browser extension, Google aims to add offline capabilities to all the world's Web 2.0/AJAX applications, not only Google's. From Jeff Huber:

"Certainly it would make lots of sense to have all Google's core applications to support Gears. Right now, it's only Google Reader but more are coming. And they are the ones you want to use in a plane. Myself, I want to use email, calendar and my documents."

But it would be a failure if Gears is only used on Google products. It is all about making the browser a better plateform to deliver applications."

Alternatives to Google Gears?

"There's nothing that addresses the scope that what we are doing. Dojo has an offline model and started to do somethings there but they are a little up the stack. Then there are some people that were trying to use Apache Derby which is a Java database."

"With Gears extensions you will not need to do anything to enable offline functionalities. "

On a side note, about developing more standalone applications like Google Earth:

"We believe strongly in the browser model. For Google Earth, we needed the native 3D graphics acceleration of the PC. That's why it's still a native application."

From Sundar Pichai:

"The reason why Google Reader came first, was through the 20% work time of an engineer that was taking the Google shuttle back and forth to San Francisco. He picked up the API and did it first. In fact, Sergey and i was talking "too bad he didn't see that Gmail was more important"!".

"We built Gears as a browser extension and it will work with IE, FF, Safari and Opera. It will support all browsers on all platform."

"Gears also address poor Internet connexions and high latency cases. The way the model works it that it is always serving the application locally, you're hitting the local store and developers can program their applications to do the synching automatically. It's not the case with Reader today: it's a manual synchronization but an app developer can easily do so that the syncing is seamless in the background."

Gears becoming a future standard

"We want gears to work with all the applications in the world not just Google apps. We are very interested to convert this into a standard.
How we plan to proceed? We plan to work with WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) working group (an off shoot of the W3C because it was moving too slowly). Standards don't innovate. They codify existing practices, so the browser makers can implement it and there's a single model for developers. But we have to get it out there so people can use it and give us feedback."

"By working with people like Mozilla, Opera and Adobe, our goal is that Gears will be built in and part of those applications and you don't have to download it separately."