Google Gears: Support for offline web applications

Sounds like an oxymoron, does it not ? Offline web application ? On a Google Developer Day, Google released an offline web application called Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser plug-in that will let users run web apps whether they are offline or online. Google released the source code for this browser plug-in, in an effort to create a standard for adding offline capabilities to web applications. The initial set of adopters is developers who work on the combination of JavaScript and AJAX, to entice them to move to a higher set of capabilities. Google Gears will work on a set of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari) on a variety of platforms (Windows, Mac OS and Linux). Google also plans to submit Gears to a standards body so that it will be built into all standards compliant browsers. In addition, a consumer-ready release of Gears will be available within months, and in the meantime, google expects to get feedback from developers.
Google has a variety of web application, and customers have always complained about not being able to access these when they are offline, hence the quest by Google to bring about an offline version. The first application to use this will be Google Readers, an RSS reader. In a sign that this has not been a sudden development, Google Gears has been endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation, by Adobe Systems and by Opera Software.
The software has 3 components - a web server running in the browser, SQLite which is an open source database, and browser extensions that allow multiple JavaScript jobs to run in parallel. Being able to run multiple JavaScript jobs in parallel prevents locking up of the browser if any of the threads is causing a locking.