Site specific browsers(SSBs) are my new favorite thing. If you haven’t heard of SSBs yet, this will change the way you use the web, and your life will change for the better forever and ever. SSBs are just what they sound like: a browser specifically for one website. Sounds ridiculous and useless doesn’t it? Why would I want a bunch of browsers when I can have tabs in Firefox? Well I’m going to show you.

Here comes Fluid

Fluid is a program(Mac only, see below for windows recommendations) for creating these SSBs. From the Fluid website:

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing Dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock menu items, and more.

That may sound dry and uninteresting to you at first, but once you see it in action you will start to see the light. Watch the screencast as Todd Ditchendorf walks you through creating twitter and digg SSBs.

Desktop Clients via Fluid from Todd Ditchendorf on Vimeo.

Convinced yet? No? Well you could check out thumbnail browsing or the tabbed browsing demo. This was enough for me to start experimenting and seeing what Fluid could actually do.

My First Impressions

I fired up Fluid and decided to try out Pandora. Creating a SSB is incredibly easy. Enter the address you want, name it, choose an icon. You can use the favicon or check out the flickr group for icons. After the initial setup you have options to customize and make the SSB behave how you like. You can even create a menuextra.

Now I can have Pandora behave more like a program, I can launch it with 2 keystrokes and it doesn’t crash when Firefox will. I used this little app, but it really wasn’t all that amazing to me. My revelation came when I found Grooveshark. This was the perfect site for a SSB. I can launch Grooveshark in a SSB and have an unlimited music library in a very slick iPod like interface.

This is when I realized how useful SSBs are. I quickly jumped online and got Google Reader in its own SSB. Twit live now has its own SSB. And for productivity I added the PayMo service into two SSBs. One SSB is for the web based dashboard and adding things like clients, projects, and tasks. The other is a menuextra I use to start and stop the time tracker. Paymo already has a widget but I don’t like using OS X’s dashboard for anything other than checking weather, so this works out perfect for me.

My Lasting Impression

With so many web apps available the uses for Fluid and SSBs is almost unlimited. I think people like the way “programs” work, and how they interact with a program. Freeing these web applications from the browser separates “internet browsing” from the application which is important to me.

Windows?

Well I know not everyone is part of the Apple cult…yet. So I searched around and found BubblesHQ. Unfortunately this looks much more limited when compared to Fluid so your mileage may vary. If anyone knows a good substitute for windows leave the link in the comments, until then google for “Site Specific Browsers” and you will get plenty of sites to check out.

Whats Next?

If you want to know more about Fluid, I reccomend checking out the website, blog, and feature list. There is also a community around Fluid developing some really nifty scripts. Fluid also supports many advanced features, scripting, and more which I plan on going over in another post.