Most of the vision of the Web for 2008 seems to be coming true, which means it was either highly portent or most likely, already advent. I’ll do a full round up at the end of the year, but in the meantime let me game the game by pimping one of the laggards: Site Specific Browsers. In the prediction, I cited Prism and Fluidapp already, which in essence build a browser for a single site, giving you a separate icon in your taskbar. Then there are the full sized widgets, applications dedicated to reskinning a site Mailplane for reading SPAM, eBay desktop for finding scammers and Twiteriffic for frittering your life away.
All fine and dandy, but wasn’t really what I was getting at. A few months ago. A friend, who shall remain nameless, was showing me something cool on his laptop. As he typed the web address into Safari I remarked on the risk of, ahem, interesting URIs dropping down, to which he joked “don’t worry, I always use Firefox to surf for pr0n”. That joke revealed two great user stories:
- Firstly, performing all your internet banking in a Site Specific Browser is a great idea if that browser is tied to a single bank’s site and sandboxes your passwords, cookies, cache and history from other instances of the browser or widgets.
- Secondly, a “Task” or “Subject Specific Browser”, an instance of your current browser you flag for researching “butterflies”, Muppet Death Metal, or whatever, which then collects a compartmentalised subject specific cache and history for later mining, or cleansing, would be useful. Really useful.
Do such things already exist? Yes or no, expect them to be big!
“Do such things already exist? Yes or no, expect them” …
What a great idea Paul!
How to get the idea to …. Firefox and its xul people?
Agreed. I’m using several fluid (I was using prism but greasemonkey support in prism is too neat) instances for things like calendars, email, campfire and a needs to be finished svn reporter app. People generally look at my desktop in a confused manner but I’ve personally found lots of benefits. I do however (now) think it might be next year at the earliest when this actually catches on though.
I suspect this could be simply done using something to wrap the Firefox profile manager, and to allow multiple versions of Firefox to run at one time.
I used to do something like this with Mozilla profiles. Mozilla allowed multiple running instances if different profiles were given on the command line. This functionality, resurrected in Firefox, and with a simple support for giving different application icons to different profiles, would almost cover what you’re talking about. Yes, it’s a great idea, just waiting for an implementation. 8-)
“… which then collects a compartmentalised subject specific cache and history for later mining, or cleansing, …”
Sounds like the “New incognito window” feature in Chrome…
Yannis, yeah Chrome “incognito” might be good when lending your browser to someone else or surfing for pr0n, but isn’t quite a “subject specific browser” ..