I’m Onto You, Jerry: BrowserPlus Makes Its Premature Debut

Was it only last month that we got news that Yahoo's BrowserPlus had risen from the dead? It seems like it was ages ago, but what with the ongoing MicroHoo tug-of-war and all the other rally-the-troops look-we've-still-got-it developments this year (Yahoo Buzz, Shine), they are all starting to run together.

At any rate, Yahoo must have felt jealous over all the attention being given to all the other cool releases and conference news being broadcast, and decided to give us a "sneak peek" of BrowserPlus with a Flickr uploader. Want to know how much of a sneak peek it is? Flickr and BrowserPlus aren't even on the same page yet, with Flickr warning me that maybe I shouldn't trust this new kid on the block:

The install takes you through promising everything from your first-born child to spinning straw into gold to satisfy the Yahoo shareholders in order to gain access, and I'll admit it's a bit frightening for me to agree to an updater that says Ruby anything, but the short install brings you to, well, the uploadr. You can drag images from your desktop or add them from your hard drive, and once it's in the uploadr screen, you can rotate, crop, and resize your image, plus add effects, before clicking the button to upload.

It's a nifty little tool, but it's not nearly as useful for me as Skitch, and the image editor is more basic than even my trusty Seashore. I don't think that the Photoshop fans are going to abandon it for uploadr any time soon. For showing us all the promise of BrowserPlus, it just didn't wow me, and I'm starting to feel like Yahoo is the kindergartner starved for attention who wants to show you every single toy that he owns when you stop by the house. A pat on the head and a "that's nice" are given out of guilt, but you sort of wish the whole thing would just stop. Yahoo needs to be a prodigy in this analogy, and I'm still not seeing it.