Is BrowserPlus the new Google Gears?
February 18th, 2010 by 
Afraithe 
When developing Plupload we really enjoyed working with Google Gears, the whole quality of that project was just very nice from a developer perspective. Unfortunately, Google decided to stop developing Gears, possibly since HTML5 is getting a lot of the functionality, we believe it was way to early to close down Google Gears. Currently, the latest version of Google Gears does not work with Firefox 3.6 and it does not seem to be any light at the end of that tunnel, the latest post on the developer blog was at the end of May 2009.
BrowserPlus however is just full of life, the Yahoo employed developers are full at work producing quality code, after looking at the Plupload feature list, that red cross over the support for chunking really annoyed them so they have now released support for chunking and contributed a patch on Github. Spocke is currently looking it over and we expect to have that into the main code base very soon, and a new public version after that.
That means that BrowserPlus will support all functionality in Plupload, and since Google Gears doesn’t even work in the latest version of Firefox, will be the only runtime that does support all options.
Would also like to thank the ppl contributing other things for Plupload on Github and the general feedback we have received.
Posted in Development
“We are currently working on a build that works with Firefox 3.6. It is going through
February 18th, 2010 at 15:45our QA process, and we hope to release it shortly assuming no problems are found in QA.”
http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=980#c64
That is nice to know, however that post was made 8 days ago, I don’t know about you, but I find it quite critical that Gears isn’t working in Firefox 3.6 that was released almost a month ago now.
February 18th, 2010 at 16:33Gears also doesn’t work in OS X Snow Leopard Safari 4 – http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=847
February 18th, 2010 at 17:22<>
http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html
February 20th, 2010 at 23:13The main downside of BrowserPlus is that it only supports Windows & Mac OSX, not Linux.
It’s really a shame that Google Gears is starving… IMHO it’s way to early for an adoption of HTML5… even if you add up all the partial HTML 5 implementations in different browsers, you won’t get the complete feature set of the spec.
February 21st, 2010 at 14:29@Franz – linux support is a personal priority, in the works: http://github.com/browserplus/platform/blob/master/docs/LinuxPorting.txt
lloyd
February 22nd, 2010 at 21:44I’ve got BrowserPlus installed for Chrome/IE and when looking at the BrowserPlus demo I can’t drag and drop images to upload. The Google Gears demo works fine.
Any insight into this? We’re thinking of switching from a java based uploader to Pluupload bug we need cross browser drag/drop functioinality that the BrowserPlus variant should support.
February 22nd, 2010 at 22:57@HH – I’d love to take a look, but don’t want to turn this into a BrowserPlus support forum
.
Please hop on over to lighthouse and file a bug: http://browserplus.lighthouseapp.com/projects/43039-platform
You can also find us most days on freenode in #browserplus
February 23rd, 2010 at 08:04