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April 19, 2008

Yahoo Offers Limited Release Of BrowserPlus

Duncan Riley

15 comments »

browserplus.jpgYahoo has offered a limited release of Yahoo BrowserPlus, a software distribution framework that allows device developers to bridge the browser programming environment to any component.

Skylar Woodward explains:

Some time ago we created a platform team to focus on device software at Yahoo! and this is what has emerged amidst the quickly shifting strategy of the mothership. The 1.0 release of BrowserPlus is intended only for use by Yahoo! sites to enhance customer experiences; however, in the coming months, developers might expect the ability to use components on their own sites. (If you’re interested in this, send us feedback). In the meantime, you can hack the framework on your own system after you’ve installed it to start experimenting. You can experience BrowserPlus currently through the PhotoDropper module on Mash, though direct installs are available for mac or pc.

Ajaxian notes that there were rumors of a Yahoo Gears style project that was cancelled, but BrowserPlus seems to be the fruit of that project. Details so far a fairly light, but competition in this space provided by Yahoo will hopefully fire increased development from competing services as well.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Yahoo、「BrowserPlus」をデベロッパー向けに一部リリース

    April 20th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

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  1. Jon

    April 19th, 2008 at 5:49 pm

    Is it just me or has Yahoo gone into overdrive with product and service releases since Microsoft announced they will try a hostile takeover of the company?

    Jon
    http://dreamclue.com …get the message!

  2. Chacha102

    April 19th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    Honestly, I think they are trying to show people that there really isn’t an imminent (Spelling courtesy of Firefox. ) downfall of Yahoo, and that if they don’t need to take the deal to survive as a company. Now if anyone actually believes it, its a whole other story…

  3. Karl

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    Most of the stuff being released as of late has been in works for much longer than the MS deal and their release schedules have nothing to do with MS but rather they’re merely done now. In the case of BrowserPlus it’s 3 years worth of technologies(some on other products, that are already released) that are now being released for public use in this form.

  4. Michael Kimsal

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:21 pm

    I only see a half-baked list of questions with no substantive answers. I see no download/install option, even though the questions mostly concern installing and uninstalling software. Is this an ‘invite only’ thing?

  5. Peter Urban

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    So is this something that enables development of offline versions of online apps?

    Maybe I have been too long in the basement building our app but why again is Yahoo so desperate for that deal? I can see that Microsoft kind of needs it to keep up with big G and to finally get their foot into a real web business. But to Yahoo! has always been a hodgepodge of services and kinda got away with it, so why wouldn’t they be able to continue that route.

  6. Chris

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yah.....er_os.html

    This is probably the lamest thing I have ever read on the internet.

    That being said since our new project uses YUI, I think that this should be weaved into YUI.

  7. Nasir Jamal

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

    Yahoo must gear up if it wants to compete with Google.

  8. Bill

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    Great - so now I have to have ANOTHER framework installed? Gears, BrowserPlus, AIR, Silverlight… when will it end? Could we maybe establish one or two standards, please?

  9. Patrick Grote

    April 19th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    Jon …. you are dead on, and I thought the same thing.

    Where was this drive to innovate before? To be on the edge? A leader?

    It seems at this point they’re just throwing stuff on the wall to see if it sticks.

    Karl … I am sure they’ve been in development, but I think they key here is that they weren’t going to be offered to everyone, right? Three years in development puts it before Yang took over, which means it was developed in the “media” days.

  10. YDrive

    April 19th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    Nice! :-o

  11. jr

    April 19th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    Heh. I don’t think that browserplus was really meant to compete with something like Gears. It’s going after a different problem (possibly one closer to the sort of thing activex and XUL does where the browser is opened up a bit more to the host system, but hopefully a great deal more secure). Heck, I’m guessing that there’s no reason that BrowserPlus and Gears couldn’t work together just fine.

    As for the “sudden burst of innovation”, yeah, it’s mostly stuff being allowed to see daylight. There was always a strong sense of innovation, but there were things that were considered more important and thus some stuff got shelved that really shouldn’t. Yahoo really is a very different company lately.

  12. SCOGOSTOLOGY.COM

    April 20th, 2008 at 3:39 am

    This what looking into to explore its potentials. Yahoo is still a great company as long as the Great Beast do not swallow it up.

  13. Techstuff

    April 20th, 2008 at 6:34 am

    Hmmmmmmmm

  14. tech_dummy

    April 20th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    what do they mean by devices. Is it designed to run on a set-top box?

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