Remove Gears

[ryan]

Gears is being phased out in favor of HTML5.

Also svn rm gears-manifest.php, wp-gears.js, and wp-gears.dev.js.

This is unfortunate, but okay, could you please link to the ticket for adding offline storage support when committing? Might be worth re-pinging the Mozilla folks helping us.

Although Gears for Mac is no longer available, I think it's still available for Windows, isn't it?

Not a bug. Not sure that you could call it an enhancement either, but...

#7262 is the ticket for HTML5 caching. It's not looking good for using it for what we want to do though.

Some background info:

"the company is letting the sun set on its Gears project."

....

'We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.'"
 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/11/google-gears.html

Unfortunately a very small, but noticeable percentage of WordPress.com users (Gears usage has always been very small on wp.com) have complained about the stability of the browser after installing Gears.

Postponing to 3.0 per #wordpress-dev meetup.

One thing that can probably be done now is removing the conditional message "Turbo is not available for your browser." from tools.php.

There's no Turbo link in the header and no explanation of what Turbo is in tools.php, nor is the "Speed Up WordPress" section title present with gears unavailable, so it's quite the orphaned phrase.

The fact that it will be phased out and/or replaced soon is just another reason to axe that line.

For 3.0 I suggest we adjust our browser detection and hide it for OS/browser pairs that don't support it.

Other than that, I suggest future release (perhaps even wontfix, and revive the ticket in the future) until it is no longer supported by the most recent version of all grade-A browsers.

Didn't mean to change the type.

I thought we agreed to leave it under Tools (for the reasons nacin suggests), but get rid of the Turbo link in the header (for all the other reasons). Can we just get rid of the Turbo link for now?

Replying to jane:

I thought we agreed to leave it under Tools (for the reasons nacin suggests), but get rid of the Turbo link in the header (for all the other reasons). Can we just get rid of the Turbo link for now?

I agree with that. We can stop calling it "Turbo" too.

Replying to jane:

I thought we agreed to leave it under Tools (for the reasons nacin suggests), but get rid of the Turbo link in the header (for all the other reasons). Can we just get rid of the Turbo link for now?

The Turbo link only shows up if the browser has Gears installed. (It shows up under Tools just as long as it isn't Opera, though it could realistically make a more rigorous check.) I'm fine with getting rid of it, but maybe we should just rename it to "Gears"?

Additionally, as said a few months ago, we can remove the message "Turbo is not available for your browser.", which is just kind of left there without a header or any explanation of what "Turbo" is.

I say we clean this up then close this ticket out, and open a new ticket when browsers begin to drop Gears.

patch needs a refresh

(In [13833]) Remove 'Turbo' link from admin header. see #11301

Here is a fix for the javascript function for checking if gears is installed. Problem is, that gears is not always initialized.

 http://wordpress.pastebin.com/sRrPxANb

(if someone needs it, in r13833 the link is removed.)

(In [13834]) Update string to better reflect the times. see #11301

We have the all clear to remove gears completely. Let's leave the manifest stuff as is but remove the JS and everything from the UI.

Remove Gears stuff from tools.php

Remove Gears JS files and entry in script-loader

(In [13981]) Remove Gears from UI. see #11301

The tools menu is now empty for those with the read capability. I'd bump it to edit_posts right now, but someone could be using the tool_box action to add stuff for readers.

Personally, I don't like the idea of shipping an empty tools menu to subscribers in a default install. As it is, I always wondered why gears wasn't edit_posts to begin with.

Replying to nacin:

The tools menu is now empty for those with the read capability. I'd bump it to edit_posts right now, but someone could be using the tool_box action to add stuff for readers.

+1 on bumping to edit_posts. Tools should mean "tools for creating/managing content".

(In [14097]) Bump tools.php from read cap to edit_posts. Old cap was for Gears. fixes #12903, see #11301.

One more file to remove: wp-admin/gears-manifest.php

I believe the Manifest is staying for users who've currently got Gears active. see ryans comment above mentioning leaving the manifest too

Yes, we're leaving the manifest for now.