Google gears trying to play catch up with Adobe AIR

Google Gears

Is Google Gears (an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript API) a competitor to Adobe AIR? According to the google website http://gears.google.com/
It will let you:

• Store and serve application resources locally

• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database

• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Hmm let's hope the competition helps improve AIR even more!