May 29, 2008, 8:54 PM — Yahoo this week announced it is working on BrowserPlus,
a development platform for creating Web applications that contain desktop capabilities.
BrowserPlus joins similar projects, including Google's Gears, Adobe's AIR,
Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's Silverlight and others, designed to let developers
make applications that leverage the best of the desktop and Web environments.
Yet questions abound regarding these competing efforts, such as whether they
will create confusion among users, and about BrowserPlus itself, which developers
can download and examine but cannot currently build anything with.
On Thursday, IDG News Service had a chance to pose these and other questions
to Skylar Woodward, principal software engineer at Yahoo's Brickhouse division,
and to Cody Simms, senior director of product management for the company's Yahoo
Open Strategy effort.
An edited version of the interview follows:
IDGNS: What is the status of BrowserPlus?
Cody Simms: The version out there is production ready, so we'll be engaging
with partners to start getting BrowserPlus supported on sites around the Web.
Then we plan a broader, fuller, self-service release later this year.
Today, developers can't build it into their sites. They can download it to
their desktops and play with it and see what services it can make available
to them as though they were an end-user looking at it. They can get in and look
at the code they'd be able to integrate with their site, but they can't build
their site around it just yet, except for a select set of partners we're going
to be working with.
Skylar Woodward: It's production ready today to use it on any partner site.
In terms of everything being baked and ready, so developers don't have to change
[their applications] too much later, the reason why we're putting it out now
is because we want this to be an open community discussion about what things
should be in here and how it should work. We want people to look at our APIs
[application programming interfaces] and be critical and evaluate them. So in
that sense, [regarding] the most flexible part of the system, which are the
services, we'd love to get community feedback so this isn't something that's
already set and won't change. We want to respond to the community, and listen
to what they want and need, so that when we [release it into general availability],
there doesn't have to be a lot of changing [of applications.]
IDGNS: BrowserPlus sounds similar to Google's Gears and other initiatives like
Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Is it?
Simms: You're seeing a strong trend toward people realizing that there can
be a bridge between the browser and the desktop. So there are a number of different
technologies out there playing in that arena. Each one of the technologies that
has been announced or released recently has fairly different use cases about
how you can bridge those two things and tackle the problem. Some of them are
more focused on bringing Web functionality to the desktop, while others are
more focused on bringing desktop functionality to the browser.
BrowserPlus is uniquely focused on making the browser richer with all these
kinds of pieces of functionality that normally would be reserved for desktop
clients. BrowserPlus has some strengths related to how easily and quickly we
can deploy new services. We're not focused on one monolithic use case. BrowserPlus
is very focused on being an open platform that can be extended with new types
of services and thus enable new, interesting functionality. We don't yet know
what will be the killer app that will be built on BrowserPlus, but we want to
enable the development community to discover that by using it.
Woodward: The key differentiator here is that the system is able to bring down
new services and features and capabilities, not necessarily to the browser,
but to applications written for browsers: things like Yahoo Mail and Facebook
or a Web site. Normally when you want to get new features like these, you have
to do a monolithic download, whether it's a whole new browser or you have to
download plug-ins to get new capabilities. But with BrowserPlus, once it's there,
the user has this very seamless experience that doesn't restart the browser,
you don't have to go through this complex install process; a simple dialog comes
up saying something like 'The person who wrote this site requires you to have
these extra features in order to use this. Do you want to want to activate them?'
If you say 'yes', the process is usually very quick. The features are activated
immediately and the page comes alive.
