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.

More Geographical Comparison Operators for Braindump

Using the distance calculation in the nice Geopy library, you can do this now:

import graphstore
 
g = Graph(‘:memory:’)
 
g.set(‘Barrack Obama’,‘hometown’,‘Chicago, Illinois’)
 
g.list(‘hometown is within 50 miles of Gary, Indiana’)
# (some calls to the Google Maps Geocoding API…)
# => [u’Barrack Obama’]

Geographical Comparison Operators in Braindump

I just commited a change to braindump that makes this possible:

import graphstore
 
g = graphstore.Graph(‘graph.db’)
 
g.set(‘Barrack Obama’,‘home state’,‘Illinois’)
g.set(‘John McCain’,‘home state’,‘Arizona’)
 
print g.list(‘home state is south of Canada’)
# => [u’John McCain’, u’Barrack Obama’]
 
print g.list(‘home state is east of Kansas City’)
# => [u’Barrack Obama’]

When you run a query with ‘is [direction] of’, graphstore queries the Google Maps Geocoding API to get the coordinates of each of the involved locations, then compares them to see what’s north, south, east, or west of what. (my code) I might try to add ‘within x miles of’ later. The external web requests slow things down, but it’s still cool, if not practical.

Google Changing the Game Again

Google Chrome, Google’s new browser, gives each tab its own process, and stays up when one tab crashes. Pretty cool. It also has a Task Manager, reminiscent of Windows’, which shows how much memory each tab and plugin is using. John Resig points out that showing how much memory each site is taking up will make people blame high memory usage on the site instead of the browser, a move that he calls “devious in the best sense of the word”.

Every application gets a process, the browser isn’t affected by application crashes, task manager, local storage, blaming memory usage on applications — it sounds as if we’re talking about an OS, not a browser.

I wonder how far behind a full-blown OS is — maybe just Chrome on top of Linux, with nothing in between.