Site-Specific Browsers
Seeing SSB’s like Fluid, Mozilla Prism, and Chrome’s shortcut feature have made me wonder, what’s the big deal about a browser with no controls that can only go to one site? Why would you use this instead of just opening sites in a full-fledged browser like always?
By giving a web application its own window and an icon on the desktop/dock, it moves web apps out of the browser into the domain of the operating system: you use the OS’s desktop or dock to launch them instead of your browser’s address bar, you can use exposé on them on a mac, you use your OS’s window-cycling keyboard shortcut instead of your browser’s tab-cycling keyboard shortcut to cycle through them, etc. Fluid goes further towards integrating web apps into the desktop by exposing some Cocoa APIs like setting the dock badge and sending Growl notifications to JavaScript. Anyway, By using the OS’s interface to manage web apps instead of the browser’s, it makes web apps seem more legitimate. That’s it, really. The hype on the Prism blog post is a bit much.
03:54 PM | 0 Comments