Bubbles and Fluid turn your favorite sites into apps

I may get fired for saying this, but I miss the convenience, focus, and robustness of desktop apps. Sometimes I just want the clarity of a dedicated app--or the isolation; all too often when I'm in a browser, a rogue JavaScript-heavy site will crash not just its own window but the 20 different tabs I have open at that moment.

Building a Site-Specific Browser (SSB) is possible with technologies like Prism from Mozilla, but that doesn't do much for non-developer users. If all you want is an icon to click on your desktop to open a specific URL, and running the site in its own browser isn't what you had in mind, check out two apps: Fluid (download), for OSX, and Bubbles (download) for Windows. Both are free.

With Fluid, you can create as many SSBs as you want, control each of their preferences individually, and let them live where you need them: in the Dock, your desktop, or the Apple Menubar. I especially like the latter because I've created icons for four sites I check on and off during the day. Fluid, which requires Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), also lets you create a single SSB with multiple panes fed from different sites, add a CoverFlow-like preview pane of links leading from the Web app you've desktopized, and will with a bit of Greasemonkey scripting it can alert you via Growl when something changes. Fluid is freeware, says it's creator, Todd Ditchendorf, and will remain so, although he's seeing over 20,000 downloads a month.

Fluid strips the chrome off of your favorite Web sites.

Bubbles for Windows lets you do much the same thing as Fluid. You can update your Windows environment with your latest Web apps as pop-up windows accessible from the system tray. Bubbles' developer, Ohad Eder Pressman, has gone to the trouble of prebuilding extensions for a dozen-plus popular Web apps: Want a Facebook bubble app that refreshes your FB News Feed every 5 minutes, or a Bubble that checks Gmail for you? You're done.

Bubbles' scripts make selected sites look and feel like apps.

Users will always need free-form browsers for exploring the Web, but for their main Web apps, site-specific browsers can do a good job of imitating the local app experience.

[digiSal]

lets not forget Mozilla's Prism. I use that at work for a few workstations.

[digiSal]

ah, you did mention Prism. but no screenies and i am no developer and still use it.

[BobWalsh47]

Prism's fine, but I'm finding using the edges of my desktop as a head's up online status display is making my life easier. I'd really like to see Fluid have an autorefresh setting as Bubbles does, and both to have a "something's changed" optional icon.

[Sleep Dawg]

First, rogue Javascript? Mmm, try more like rogue Flash crapola streaming in the background without me getting a voice on whether I want to see it or not. Some adware most likely.

And why the hell would anyone have 20 tabs open in a browser at once? That's ASKING for trouble. It's like driving down the highway talking on your cell phone, eating MacDonalds, Shaving, and applying eyeliner. All at the same time. Eyes on the road, Mister!

Do what any normal person does, and open one window for each site. CLOSE them if you are not using the site still after 5-10 minutes. It's good etiquette, and you won't invite the memory leaks that are so prevalent in the crappy software we call web browsers. If you have too many open and complain about it, you need to slow down and concentrate. You aren't paying attention to enough detail and it's making your work sloppy. We all suffer because of it.

And frankly, inviting users to add more detritus to their sys tray, when they should be striving to run it as simply and as cleanly as possible, is just amateur. Stop advising to bulk up, and start providing insight into why end users of software are better served by bulking down.