Genius! And a little bit of competition for Adobe's Air, although BrowserPlus woprks directly in the browser. Nice! Can't wait for the public release, as this has really got my brain juices flowing.

Thank you for pioneering new web technologies

Well, I hope you can unite with Google and the Google Gears team on this. Otherwise we'll end up writing code to check for browser extensions instead of browsers, and then we are back in 1998.

As a Ruby developer I like the fact that you have a focus on that language (although I am sure you will support more in the future) but I have a few concerns:

1. Google is trying to do similar things (extend the browser) with Google Gears. Why not work with them instead of creating yet another thing users have to install.
2. Notice that you only support a few platforms. Your FAQ indicates more platforms will be supported later but will this always be the case. I.E. are the other platforms always going to be second place to if we want to use the latest features it is effectively a recent Windows or Mac only product?
3. You say you require user approval before allowing insecure actions but isn't this how we got the ActiveX mess. Users click "Yes" without really considering what it is asking exposing their computer without understanding they are doing so?

While I will certainly keep my eye on this there are many concerns here from my perspective.

Hi Eric,

In terms of your second question about covering more platforms, we tried to respond in our FAQ: "Extending the breath of platform support in BrowserPlus is a key goal, and we will continue to extend it to run in more places." This is meant to convey that we care about widespread platform support, and we're going to work toward that goal.

In terms of your third question, it's an excellent point that we've wrangled with a bit. Each service presents unique security concerns, and prompting the user is a "last resort tool". There are some places where we have better mechanisms available to us, such as the opaque file handle representation (http://browserplus.yahoo.com/docs/samples/?s=drag_and_drop)
that lets us rely on user interaction as a form of implicit permission
(very similar to the model of the browse button today, non-spoofable user interaction
indicates consent, and the actual file selected is kept out of reach
of untrusted javascript).

thanks for your thoughts,
lloyd

In "Extending the breath of platform support . . . "

"breath" should be "breadth."

What about Eric's first question? I really like to know your reasons. some years will be passed and developers feel confused about provided platform and ...

Is some documentation for developers available yet? It is hard to see the potential without docs. Could only find few examples on browserplus site. thanks!

For docs: The published sample code is the extent of what we have available today:
http://browserplus.yahoo.com/docs/samples/

As for the Gears question, we're already cooperating in the sense that we all are working to advance the web!

best,
lloyd

You want me tell you what sucks?

The main thing that sucks is that you are not doing this as an open source effort with Gears. If you started a year ago (directly after Gears was launched) why didn't you just join that open source project? It is clear that BrowserPlus is trying to solve the exact same problems (although it is as proprietary as Flash) without even trying to make this play along with HTML5. PStorage is solving the same issue as HTML5 storage with a new API. You should follow what Gears is doing with Database2.

I'm sorry if I came across a bit negative. BP seems pretty good. It is a shame that it was done in a dark room without any clues what was going on outside that dark room ;-)

"As for the Gears question, we're already cooperating in the sense that we all are working to advance the web!" -- in the same way Microsoft and Adobe are cooperating with Silverlight and Flash.

Alright, obviously that answer was unsatisfying. Let me try one more time...

At the time Gears was launched, it was a tool to take websites offline. A very good tool. In recent months Google and the Gears community have shifted to the more general goal of extending the web by implementing tools that people can use today, low level building blocks with wide appeal - the stuff that standards are (eventually) made of. I'm delighted by this expanded goal because I think it's important work. Contrasted with BrowserPlus, at the time we started, and today, we're focused on fixing a different problem: Plugins should be easier to write and available in more places. This is the case we're trying to explain on our homepage with the word "playful": "Being playful means that some of the APIs we publish may not be useful to a large audience, but they will be fun."

While there are many undeniable similarities, and media typically emphasizes these elements to build a compelling story of competition, there are also some very important differences. For me it's not clear that "BrowserPlus is trying to solve the exact same problems", and I think the overall movement is much more powerful if you consider the combined goals of the two approaches.

It is my sincere hope that as we continue to open the platform the important, distinct, and in many cases complimentary features of all of these tools will become clearer. I understand the natural tendency to explain technology through comparison and analogy, but I think in this case it may be muddling the conversation.

Don't get me wrong, installing ten plugins to use a website sucks. I totally agree. BrowserPlus itself is an attempt to address this problem.

Finally, we should continue to criticize fragmentation, perceived or actual, to keep ourselves honest and focused on the people who matter: developers and end users. We asked for and value this feedback: it's the primary reason we released a Sneak Peek.

very best,
lloyd

I am a developer from AccuWeather, and we are very interested in developing an early application for the browerplus platform. However, we submitted a yahoo widget to that gallery weeks ago, and we have not heard anything about the approval. Are you going to be supporting browerplus more than yahoo widgets? Also, do you know if there is a problem with gallery approvals as we would really like to have our widget out there.

Thanks Lloyd. I'm sorry I came off so harsh. BrowserPlus has some nice features but I still believe that making this an open source project in collaboration with Gears would be a better path for the open web.

What I fail to understand is, why Intel Mac only? This is not ASM code or SSE3 code, it is ruby!

Rick: we'll support browserplus the best we can, and I'll forward on your issue.

Erik: No worries, it's an important question that a lot of people are asking

llgaz: Platform breadth will improve!

Yeesh, we're bending the whole "blog" idea here :)

lloyd

Ignore all of the "there can only be one" people. Develop your own thing, and the best will rise to the top.