Yahoo and Google attempt to improve the browser

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

A year after 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 websites.

"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 websites 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.

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.

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 websites.

When Google launched Gears a year ago, the company overemphasised 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.

The new features of Gears, 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.

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

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:

|> 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 website 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 websites, 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.

Google also announced that it's expanding browser support for Gears.

"We are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile," Prince said.

Google appears to be trying to make it easier for competitors to embrace Gears. At its Google I/O conference, Google de-branded Gears today, taking its name off the project, 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.

When MySpace users go to their mailbox, they'll be invited to install Google Gears, said Allen Hurff, MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, in an appearance on Wednesday at the Google I/O conference. "It's available to everyone today," Hurff said.

When users install Gears, they'll be able to quickly search their inboxes for specific terms or sort messages, for example to show unread mail, Hurff said.

Gears hasn't caught on widely, but MySpace gives the project more clout. And Google thinks some of Gears' success is actually measured in its influence over the new HTML 5 standard for describing Web pages.

In MySpace's case, one useful Gears feature is local storage on a computer. Another is the ability to run multiple threads at the same time — in effect, to walk and chew gum at the same time. For MySpace, that includes letting a computer index text at the same time it draws user-interface elements on the browser screen, Hurff said.