Google Gears (opens in new tab)

Poor Microsoft. They had almost 10 years of near complete browser dominance. They could have built anything they wanted into IE. And they didn't. They kept it's JavaScript crippled and they kept CSS broken.

Very stupid, if you ask me. They could have turned IE into very powerful development platform, capable of doing amazing things and used it as their leverage to dominate Internet just like they did with desktops, leveraging their OS. They could have built it for Linux/Mac/Windows, natively (without always missing plugins) supporting UI languages like XUL/Xaml. And they didn't.

That is simply beyond my understanding... Hey, I am not talking about early 90s, when Gates supposedly said "Internet is not important to us". I am talking late 90s - early 2000s, when Microsoft already knew Internet was big.

Just started reading about Google gears. It is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Source Link: http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11628 http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69197&topic=11629

I hope to see this idea take off, it's a great addition to current Web 2.0 technologies, but I highly doubt this will see the adoption rate necessary to make implementing it useful. It's the issue of "it needs to be implemented for people to adopt it, and people need to adopt it for it to be worth implementing" conundrum.