The End Of Web Browsers As We Know Them
Usually I have minimumly 5 tabs open @ any given time - and I’m not even doing anything.
When I used Firefox I’d use the faviconize plugin which helped somewhat, but now I only use Firefox when I develop so I have the same issues with Camino.
But just recently, Scott showed me he found something better.. Fluid is an OS X application that will let you create custom Site Specific Browsers (SSBs).
Fluid utilizes Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and is a native Cocoa OS X application. Essentially you can think of it as a site-specific custom Safari browser.
One thing I immediately wanted to do was separate my Google Apps into 1 SSB with Fluid. But, by default every new instance does not have tabbing enabled, but you can easily enable tabs via the application’s Preferences. Now all the Google Apps I use daily - gmail, calendar, reader, docs, and analytics are separated out and saves me from tab-salad-hell.
Another good use for Fluid is to create applications for 37signals products. I spend a lot of time daily in Campfire and Basecamp. It was only a logical move I should create an app for each. 37signals went so far as to provide icons just for this use so your dock can stay pretty.
Previously I used Pyro which was a less-than-stable wrapper for Campfire around the same idea. The jury is out as to which is better, but since it’s essentially just a Safari browser tab - I’m pretty certain Pyro has seen its day on my desktop.
Fluid even handles notifications from the various apps. Check out the Fluid icons Flickr group to keep that dock sexy.
I was pretty impressed, and I’m glad I run a Mac so I can enjoy all the goodness Fluid has to offer. Bye bye tab-salad, this is the end of web browsers as we know them.
Update (a couple days later)
So I’ve been using Fluid based SSB’s for Basecamp, Campfire, and Gmail for the last couple days and wanted to air out a few annoyances.
- I’m back on Pyro. Growl notifications for Campfire are just too important and are not available in the Campfire Fluid-based SSB. I found myself checking Campfire for no reason frequently because I got no notification like I used to. I didn’t realize how reliant I was on them.
- Basecamp as an SSB is good enough for me right now - I’ll probably stick with it.
- Gmail & Google Apps work okay, not great. Camino is my browser by default, and usually if you open a link from Gmail it will fire that url in another tab - however with Gmail as a Fluid-based SSB a blank window (not a tab) is created, and then the link is opened in Camino in a new tab (if it’s open). This is a pretty big annoyance, although I’m trying to stick it out, but when I remember to avoid the blank window from opening I find that I’m copy and pasting the link itself into Camino which is pretty lame.
That’s it. I’ve only had it a couple days and already an update was pushed out to me, hopefully these minor annoyances will get fixed promptly and I can continue the SSB goodness!
Update 3/30/08
2+ months out I’m now ONLY using Fluid for Basecamp.The other services (like gmail) were just odd to work with and felt like a pain more than anything. I’ve since installed the Google Notifier so I can be alerted there’s a queue of email backup before I even bother to check. This method seems to be working best.
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