About bloody time! I'm amazed it's taken them this long to do something about that awful photo uploader, when photos are surely one of their killer apps. The number of (unanswered) complaints on their forum about this issue must run into tens of thousands.<p>But did it seriously require a complete rewrite instead of just fixing that woefully buggy Java applet? And could they really not have achieved this new implementation with Gears or YBP? They're rather vague on what was missing from those plugins, and I remember Google stating that they supported decent file upload functionality (including drag and drop) just fine.
Interesting approach. They have built a UI-less browser plugin that exposes new javascript API to your web app.<p>That gets me thinking about other possible browser plugins along those lines:
- Expose the native filesystem
- Fire an event when a USB device is connected
- Or when email is received
...
The photo uploader on facebook has always been lame, taking ages to load and often crashing. It's a classic case of over-engineering. I've always ended up using the simplified uploader, which is much more straightforward.
The photo uploader is the first step towards them taking over the browser completely. They will trick users into using this and start dark testing new features, over time they will replace the majority of the browser's built-in rendering engine.<p>Nothing like being able to execute arbitrary x86 code through the browser....