Dr. Dobb's | Web Apps With An Icon

Web Apps With An Icon

I know I'm a little late to the party here, but I'm finally starting to see the use case for Site Specific Browsers.

For those of you who haven't used one, an SSB is basically a web browser that's dedicated to accessing pages from a single site or application with a lot of the extras stripped out -- that's right, no location display, toolbar, or menus. Popular examples include Mozilla's Prism and Fluid for OS X (based on Apple's WebKit). You could also argue that Adobe's AIR platform provides an SSB of sorts.

So how does it work? Well, with Fluid, you run the app, it asks you for a name and a URL, and creates a desktop application icon for that site, err, application. You can then click and launch that site directly, as if it were any normal application.

So this sounds pretty crippled, right? Then why, exactly, are they useful? I can think of a few reasons...

July 17, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/web-apps-with-an-icon/228701894