Google has quietly pulled the plug on its browser plug-in, Gears, that enables offline use of Web-based services like Gmail and Google Docs. In a post on its Gears API Blog Friday, entitled Hello HTML5 Ian Fette, of Google's Gears team, acknowledged that the company has shifted its effort away from new releases of Gears and towards bringing those offline capabilities to Web standards like HTML5.

"We're not there yet, but we are getting closer," he wrote, detailing that the latest release of Google's Chrome browser natively supports a database API similar to those in Gears and new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. He promised other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, will be incorporated into new standards and included in Chrome shortly.