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Dubbed BrowserPlus, the service could be regarded as Yahoo's equivalent of Google Gears, which extends the functionality of popular web applications offline.

"Yahoo BrowserPlus is software that extends the capabilities of your web browser to make richer web experiences possible," the company claims. "Different websites can use BrowserPlus to support things like drag and drop from the desktop, easier file uploads, more efficient and secure acquisition of feeds and information, and native desktop notifications."

Yahoo is demonstrating the power of the software with

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one of its own popular web apps, Flickr. The Browser Plus Uploadr [sic] allows users to simply drag and drop photos from their desktop folders into the browser, where basic edits such as cropping, resizing and greyscaling can be applied, before the photos are subsumed into your Flickr account.

The service worked smoothly in our brief trials, although having dragged the photos into the browser, it does seem a touch unnecessary to have to press an "upload" button to make the pictures appear in your Flickr collection.

Yahoo is also demonstrating a BrowserPlus IRC chat client. "BrowserPlus services allow us to chip away at the benefits of 'going native', by exposing things like notifications, text-to-speech conversion, direct network communication, and persistent client-side storage for saving preferences," Yahoo claims.

BrowserPlus is currently in beta (or 'sneak peak' mode, to use Yahoo's parlance) and is available for download here.

The software works on both Windows and Mac OS X, with support for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.