Google has announced that it will stop development of its Gears browser plugins which allowed powerful features including offline storage (for running web apps while offline), geolocation, web workers, and desktop integration.

Instead, Google will support these features as defined (or in process) in the W3C’s HTML5 specification.

This is good for the “one web” goal, but like other proprietary implementations there will be a cost: developers who embraced Gears’ way of doing things will now have to rewrite their code, including big names like WordPress, which took this way for offline storage and speeding the admin interface.