Could Gears be the trojan horse for Chromium?
Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Gears included the entire Chromium rendering engine?
A few people have been posing the idea of using Flash’s own WebKit-powered browser to render web pages in Internet Explorer, which would achieve the duplicate goal of leap-frogging the web platform forwards and not forcing users to upgrade their browsers. (Such an approach would be a hack at best, and it would introduce other problems.) In a similar vein, we’ve seen people build plug-ins for IE from pieces for Mozilla to upgrade the Explorer’s capabilities.
Up to a few days ago, Google’s approach to this problem was to distribute light platform upgrades (such as offline browsing and location awareness) to existing browsers in their Google Gears plug-in. With the release of Google Chrome this strategy has shifted: Rather than upgrading the existing platform, Google is making a play to replace the platform. Presumably Gears is going to co-exist with Chrome. We’ll see development on Gears as long as support in Google’s products for IE, Firefox and Safari is needed. Which is going to be a long, long time.
Now, here Google presented with an appealing opportunity. In addition to just embedding Gear in Chrome they could embed Chrome in Gears. This would allow developers to require Gears in Internet Explorer (IE, of course, being just a random example) and then use Chromium to render pages rather than IE’s own native engine. Intriguing, right?