For the mac, there's
Fluid and on a Windows machine there's
Prism two applications that let you make more and more applications quickly and easily. These applications, as you may guess from the title, are designed to let you browse a specific website, although you can in Fluid at least (I assume in Prism too) change some preferences to get a complete go-anywhere browser.
What's the point? Well, I have readers for things I use a lot and/or things that can be fussy:
- Loading an SSB is almost always faster than opening up a full browser so it's got that.
- I use quick-silver so it's not clear that I save much time in finding an SSB compared to finding a bookmark and opening it via quicksilver. On the other hand I have a couple of SSBs that sit in the dock full time and that IS appreciably faster.
- I sometimes browse to sites (moderately often ones I'm writing) that aren't exactly stable... crashing an SSB means I don't crash all those tabs in my main browser too.
- I can also have slim-line browsers with different menus, buttons etc. relevant to the need. I don't actually use google docs that much for generating new material, but I read google docs that others share with me quite often. A nice, ultra-low profile browser window (just the edges of the window basically) gives me the most screen real-estate for working on it. For places where I want, or need, more I can have a button bar show, and can easily have just the buttons I want and need for that browser.
- I also have multiple "home" pages - each SSB gets its own. In Library Thing my homepage is "add new book" but I often finish a session elsewhere. Having the LT SSB open on the homepage by default, no problem, whilst some of the others open where I left them when I quit - all as I choose.
- Finally, and not to be sneezed at, things like gReader which display a number (of new feeds, new mail via the gMail site too I guess) will display that number on the dock icon, just like mail does for new mail on the mac. I don't have to actively choose to open the browser, click over to the right bookmark (that can take time too) and then see if there are any new feeds, I just check the gReader icon in the dock, just like I check the mail icon in the dock, and go from there.
I know there are people that don't like tabbed browsing out there (I find it hard to believe, but I know there are). This sort of approach could be great for them too, because they get a separate window per browser that they use this way. I personally like tabs (I find it odd that you have to turn them ON as a preference rather than turning them off if you want to)
and I like SSBs because I get some or all of the benefits shown above.
The downside - you create about 10-15MB sized files each time with Fluid (not sure with Prism obviously) so if you're badly out of hard drive space you might be in trouble. Their file type on the mac is "application" so if you aren't an admin user (because you are using a university/college owned lap top say) you may not be able to create them easily. Happily for me, neither of these apply, and they do make it nice to use.
Of course, if I was a regular in AjaxLife or similar, I'd have yet another installation of a Second Life client - this time a browser based one!
