Google Gears: a sea change for web applications?

I thought that Adobe Apollo might have hit a sweet spot for allowing developers to create hybrid desk top and web applications. I think that Google may have hit a sweeter spot with Gears. Gears installs as a FireFox add-on and uses the SQLite database to store data locally on your file system. Each site that you visit that is 'Gears enabled' causes a pop up permissions dialog to appear - I recommend being careful of which web sites you allow to use the Gears add-on. I have reviewed the developers' documentation and it looks straight forward to set up and a Javascript SQL database API makes it easy to use SQL in your Javascript.