It’s an expected fact of a geek life that interesting technologies and gadgets appear when you don’t have either means or time to play with them. No surprise then that Google Gears was announced exactly at such a time for me. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, Google Gears is a browser extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer (with Safari coming up) which lets developers create web applications that can also run offline on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Google isn’t the first company doing something like this. Adobe has Apollo, Microsoft is working on its own thing, Mozilla added support for offline storage in version 2 of the fox and there are some less well known attempts like Dojo’s. What makes it special are few things.

First, unlike Apollo or Firefox, it’s not a special environment and it’s as cross-browser and cross-platform as it gets these days. Google is also trying to build an industry support for this and Adobe already announced it will support Gears API in Apollo. Same has already been done by Dojo Toolkit. There’s also an intention to make it an open standard by submitting proposal to WHATWG/W3C (and hopefully them accepting it).

Personally, I can’t wait to play with WorkerPool API (which seems to be overlooked in all the excitement). Having a possibility of running time-intensive operations in a background without the fear of triggering “unresponsive script” dialog is a wish come true. Even though you can’t access objects document and window (and hence any part of the DOM). Reason for this is that background scripts don’t share any execution state and hence can’t all access unique objects like aforementioned ones.

This might limit usefulness of the API somewhat, but there are still plenty of uses that come to my mind. What also comes to my mind is a problem, that isn’t really technological. Web applications gave impression to public of being fairly safe to use even on public computers (which isn’t really true) and I fear many won’t understand that new tools may now store private data where they don’t expect or want them to.