I also just thought of this. During the Google Wave demo, they drug pictures from their desktop directly into the wave. One of the developers mentioned that that one feature is the only action that required Gears and everything else is just HTML5. So that’s also something that HTML5 can’t do that Gears can.

But it doesn’t really matter to me. I’ll have both installed.

Some offline caching is possible with HTML5, true, however Google would have to support it – i.e. rewrite Gmail to take advantage of the caching capability. It’s also likely that there’s more to Google Gears than merely providing a local cache, so Google is likely to continue to develop Gears regardless of if/when they start supporting HTML5 caching.

As for today’s release, I’m always stunned when hugely popular extensions don’t update prior to official releases. How long since the first beta was released, a few months? I know it’s been at least a week for the RC. Often, it’s just a matter of increasing the max version (though that doesn’t necessarily apply to Gears). Regardless, they should have been prepared.

I remember upgrading to Vista about a month before the official consumer launch, and Nvidia still didn’t have working drivers for my graphics card. It was infuriating, because Vista had already shipped to businesses 2 months prior, and Vista was RTM months before that (and Beta for who knows how long). Nvidia was totally unprepared, despite about 6 months of Beta or better code to test against.