Anigozanthos

I have to say I've found the recent Google Gears announcement slightly underwhelming, and a little worrisome.

1. The local thread pool functionality is already available to Javascript programmers right now via things like the setTimeout function.
2. The local database is doing the same job as the WHATWG Client-side database storage proposal, and could possibly be interpreted as undermining the efforts of the WHATWG in this area. I wish standards moved faster...
3. I'm not sure why a local server is needed. Web browsers can already serve local files. The only reason for a server would be to process server-side scripts, like Perl or PHP. I don't much like the idea of a web server running on my machine either.

Then there's the fact it requires a special plugin to be installed. How is that furthering a cross-browser, platform-independent web? So far only IE and Firefox are supported, Safari is mentioned for the future, and, as usual, Opera is not mentioned at all. What about mobile and other non-desktop devices? How many of those will Google develop the plugin for?

The general idea sounds sort of cool, but I can't help but think Google would have been better off getting the WHATWG WebApps proposal going faster. They've already done some good work getting canvas support into IE. Why couldn't they have done something similar with the WHATWG client-side storage? It would have been better than inventing their own proprietary solution. I don't know about anybody else, but I've pretty much had about enough of that sort of thing!