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Designed to enable the service to be used when only a browser is available - if you are using someone else's computer or in an Internet café, for example - Yahoo! Messenger for the Web lets you sign in from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

The browser version also honours the interoperability agreement with Microsoft that lets that Yahoo!'s estimated 22 million IM users talk to the 27 million users of Windows

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Live Messenger.

Yahoo! adds that it also lets you instant message when the standalone software is blocked by a corporate firewall. It does not say that the very fact that it is blocked suggests that IM is not encouraged.

'By removing barriers for IMing, we're about to witness a new and bigger life for Yahoo! Messenger,' said Jeff Bonforte, VP of Product Development, Yahoo! Messenger. 'Chats will carry on from computer to computer, across campuses or cubes. Your friends will travel with you to Internet cafes around the globe. You no longer will need to manoeuvre around IT restrictions. And for the millions of Internet users who don't own PCs, instant messaging is, with today's launch, instantly available from any Internet-enabled computer.'

Note that Yahoo! is far from being the first company to implement IM in a browser. AOL offers AIM Express as a 'lite' version for people who do not have access to the standalone AIM software and Google recently added IM to Gmail. There are also independent websites that provide browser-based support for several of the various IM platforms, of which the most well-known are meebo and ebuddy.