Yahoo's BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop
BrowserPlus, Yahoo's Google Gears competitor for allowing web applications to work with your desktop, rolled out two cool new features today: Drag-and-drop file uploads and desktop notifications. — These are smart additions.
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo's BrowserPlus rollout of drag-and-drop uploads and desktop notifications is a direct shot at Google Gears in the late-2008 race to dissolve the boundary between web apps and the local machine. It extends a line of Yahoo's platform bets — from iGoogle's convergence with Desktop gadgets to the social refresh of My Web — and lands just days after Yahoo Buzz gained social features, part of a broader push to make Yahoo properties stickier against Google.
First-order effects
- Developers building on BrowserPlus can now ship web apps that accept files dragged straight off the desktop and push native-style notifications, closing two capability gaps that previously required desktop software or plugins like Gears.
- Yahoo gains a concrete answer to Google Gears at the feature level, giving its own properties and third-party developers a Yahoo-controlled path to richer desktop integration.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to match drag-and-drop and notification capabilities in Gears — capabilities that eventually surface natively in competitors' products, as seen when Gmail added drag-and-drop attachment uploads in 2010 without any plugin.
- The move sharpens the platform contest between Yahoo and Google that also played out in browsers, where Yahoo had already lost ground when Opera's mobile partnership went to Google.
Third-order effects
- If plugin-based bridges like BrowserPlus and Gears keep gaining traction, browser vendors face pressure to absorb these desktop-integration features into the browser itself — a pattern that ultimately makes third-party runtime plugins obsolete as HTML standards catch up.
- The web-versus-desktop distinction erodes structurally: applications live in the browser but behave like native software, reshaping how operating systems, app stores, and browser makers compete for the application layer.
The trend: BrowserPlus is an early data point in the long arc of the browser absorbing desktop capabilities — from Gears-era plugins to today's browsers acting as full application runtimes.