Webware

It was probably inevitable given what Google did with Gears, but Yahoo said Tuesday it's releasing BrowserPlus software as open-source software.

BrowserPlus and Gears are aimed at improving browsers' native abilities so Web applications can better match those running natively on a computer's operating system, and Gears already is open-source software. Yahoo announced its intent to make BrowserPlus open-source software on its Yahoo Developers Blog on Tuesday.

"Openness is a key initiative and a major theme for Yahoo this year and beyond, and open-sourcing BrowserPlus is part of that commitment," said team member Lloyd Hilaiel. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Our hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers. I'd like to see BrowserPlus become a valuable piece of Internet infrastructure."

Hilaiel also pointed to a number of feature ideas people have suggested.

"Folks on the forums are talking about peer-to-peer support. People are suggesting screen capture technology for better bug reporting. Webcam integration! Easy import of calendaring data! Drag-and-drop of Word documents! BitTorrent! There's no shortage of ideas. Mainly I'm excited to see what the community creates in the coming weeks and months," he said.

He also drew some distinctions between BrowserPlus and Gears. "Gears is attempting to accelerate the evolution of the Web by enabling features with wide appeal that can be implemented everywhere. BrowserPlus is more interested in fixing the Web plug-in environment, making rapid experimentation possible," he said.

BrowserPlus is a framework with a variety of plug-ins; a new version released earlier in November debuted a plug-in to use computer's motion sensors, for example. The plug-in architecture is designed to let Web site designers add new abilities to Web pages without requiring people to restart their browsers. With the new version, anyone may use BrowserPlus framework, which previously had been confined to some Yahoo Web sites.

Yahoo has improved its BrowserPlus technology for more sophisticated Web applications and now lets other Web sites besides its own use it, the company said.

BrowserPlus, like Google's Gears, is software that can be plugged into a person's Web browser to make Web-based applications work more like native desktop programs.

One key feature, for example, is a better upload interface that gets around the tedious requirement at most Web sites that people individually select each photo, video, or other file to be uploaded. Another is desktop notifications, letting a Web-based e-mail, calendar, or instant messaging application notify a person of a new message or event reminder, for example.

Yahoo debuted BrowserPlus in May, but it released a new version quietly on Friday. New features include some ability to store data on the user's computer, which also is one of Gears' big selling points, and "playful support for motion sensors...on specific laptops," Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo's BrowserPlus team said in a blog posting Monday.

Yahoo apparently is hoping the features will increase adoption of the software. "It makes it possible for anyone to use BrowserPlus on their own Web site to implement better in-browser uploading and desktop notifications," Hilaiel said. Previously, BrowserPlus only would work with sites such as Yahoo's Flickr.

The company also bills BrowserPlus as a desirable plug-in framework: once users have it installed, people can let Web sites add new abilities to their browsers without having to restart their browsers. Right now, though, only Yahoo may supply the plug-ins.

Current BrowserPlus plug-ins include features to enable image editing, drag-and-drop operations, PStore for storing data, and an interface for an operating system's text-to-speech engine.

Because BrowserPlus, like Gears, is a narrowly used project, Web site designers can't count on it being installed, but they can offer some new features to people who do have it running.

Those who want to try it out can check Yahoo's BrowserPlus developer site, also newly launched.

The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there's a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.

On the other side is Adobe Systems' Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It's grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft's Silverlight.

All these technologies are advancing rapidly as Internet start-ups and giants such as Google race to transform personal computer software into services available on the Internet. These so-called rich Internet applications rarely match the performance and features of PC-based applications, at least today, but online applications can benefit from sharing, reliability, and access from multiple devices.

Kevin Hoyt, an Adobe Systems technology evangelist, believes Flash, HTML, JavaScript will coexist--but change rapidly.

(Credit: Adobe)

Consumers typically need not worry much about the programming plumbing beneath their online applications. But suppose you're the person on the hook for your company's online expense reporting tool or a start-up planning to build an online music mixer for anyone on the Internet. You'll have to place a bet on which technology is best and which programmers to hire or train.

Few expect the competition to have a winner any time soon.

"You'll continue to see a high degree of flux for probably the next several years," said Kevin Hoyt, an Adobe Systems technology evangelist for rich Internet applications.

People in the computer industry love to talk about competition, which indeed often does keep companies from growing complacent. But it's also awfully convenient when some foundational technology--Windows, JPEG, and USB spring to mind--dominates to the point where most engineers need not worry much about the messy chaos of multiple choices.

The HTML camp
The HTML side of the battle has its roots in industry standards and in the task of displaying information. That's good and bad.

Industry standards can attract broad adoption, but they're typically slow to arrive. And though both JavaScript and HTML are standards, differences in how they're implemented in different browsers--and even different versions of the same browser--force programmers to accommodate all the possibilities.

Unlike during the browser wars of the 1990s, though, there's more convergence than divergence these days. Even the upcoming version 8 of the dominant browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, will ship in a standards-compliant mode by default.

... Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google showed off working prototypes Wednesday of new possibilities for its Gears project to goose Web browsers' abilities.

When Google launched Gears a year ago, the company overemphasized one important feature, its ability to make Web applications work even when the browser is disconnected from the Internet, Chris Prince, a lead Gears engineer, said in a talk at the Google I/O conference here Wednesday. The new features, though, head in dramatically different directions: notifications on the desktop of various events, support for location information, better interactions with a computer's file system, and technology to let large file uploads proceed even when hampered by intermittent network connectivity.

Chris Prince, a Google engineer, describes new possibilities for Google's Gears software to improve Web browsers.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

At the same time Google is working on the open-source Gears project, competitor Yahoo has begun similar efforts, announcing its BrowserPlus effort this week. The moves show that the Internet giants are trying to steer the basic fabric of the Internet into more lively directions.

"I think people have realized the browser is kind of broken," Prince said in an interview after his talk. "A lot of us are trying to improve it."

The project initially was called Google Gears, but the search giant removed its name Wednesday in an effort to show it's not just the company's work. MySpace announced it's using Gears for its mail system at the show.

Prince wouldn't commit to any of the new features ever making their way into Gears, but it's clear the company has grand ambitions for what can be done with web applications. "We want to make it so Web applications can be just as powerful as desktop applications by unlocking the capability of the local machine," Prince said.

He demonstrated five Gears prototypes:

• One let a Web page create a shortcut icon on a computer's desktop so people could launch that Web application with a double-click instead of a more laborious process.

• A notification process, which like Yahoo's BrowserPlus feature ties into a computer's general system notification abilities, is a major missing piece in letting Web applications seize a user's attention the way desktop apps can. "Web apps have this problem where they can't tell users about important things happening on their system," Prince said.

• His file system demonstration showed a dialog box that let him select a large group of photos for upload rather than the one-file-at-a-time process that today afflicts Web site operations.

• A "blob"-processing ability could be used, for example, to divide a large file into bite-sized pieces, an approach that makes it easier to restore an upload interrupted by a bad network connection.

• He used a geolocation-processing ability to process latitude-longitude information to provide a more useful Google map showing bars near Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Gears still needs to handle privacy, though, when it comes to sharing location information with Web sites, he added. "There has to be permission for using location data. We haven't figured out the best model yet," Prince said.

And though he didn't demonstrate anything, Prince also said there's work under way to try to build Webcam and microphone support into Gears.

A year ago it was Google with its Gears project. Now Yahoo wants to make your browser better, too.

Yahoo BrowserPlus makes it possible to tag, crop, and perform other sophisticated operations for a Flickr photo-uploading Web site.

(Credit: Yahoo)

A year after the Google launched its Gears project, Yahoo announced software called BrowserPlus that has a similar philosophy: expand what's possible to make Web applications a better alternative to programs running natively on a personal computer. Right now, it's available only in a "sneak peek" on some Yahoo-operated Web sites.

"BrowserPlus is a technology designed to 'extend the Web,' so that developers can build more exciting Web applications and so end users can get more done inside their Web browsers," Yahoo said on a BrowserPlus frequently-asked-questions page.

Among its abilities: "Different Web sites can use BrowserPlus to support things like drag and drop from the desktop, easier file uploads, more efficient and secure acquisition of feeds and information, and native desktop notifications," Yahoo said.

This sounds good to me, at least in principle. I've been trying Google's and Facebook's Web-based instant-messaging applications, but without desktop notifications, they're only as immediate and useful as any old Web mail software.

Yahoo's BrowserPlus project aims to make Web browsers more powerful.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The software, along with Gears, shows an interesting trend in Web design: the biggest players are working to expand what can be done with the Internet. It's reminiscent of the early days of the Web, when Netscape and Internet Explorer would implement new features to permit more elaborate Web sites.

Google appears to be trying to make it easier for competitors to embrace Gears. At its Google I/O conference here Wednesday, Google de-branded Gears today, taking its name off the project and announcing some new Web browser support in the works.

BrowserPlus works on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 machines and on Windows XP and Vista machines. Supported browsers are Internet Explorer 7 or later, Apple Safari 3 or later, and Firefox 2 or later, Yahoo said.

Those who want to try it out can visit Yahoo's BrowserPlus demo site. That site offers an in-page Flickr photo uploader that lets users drag, tag, rotate, and crop photos, an IRC IM client; and for the programmer types, a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) inspector.