By Marc Hedlund
Mark Finkle has been pushing out builds of WebRunner, a Mozilla-based tool for running a standalone application with a single web site in it (a.k.a, a 'Site-Specific Browser'), for some time now, but WebRunner 0.7, released today for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is ready for its close-up.
I use WebRunner for Google Reader. I double-click a .webapp file which launches a standalone process containing just Reader, with no menus, toolbars, or other noise. WebRunner has its own cookies, so my .webapp is always logged into Google, but my main browser is not, which I like for privacy reasons[1]. When I click a link in Reader, it opens in my main browser. Also, RSS readers are hugely distracting, so being able to minimize Google Reader while still having Firefox in the foreground is a good pattern.
WebRunner 0.7 adds desktop icons, so that .webapp launchers look exactly like native applications, and also adds scripting capabilities, so that the GMail .webapp can provide new-mail notification popups. It's great to see Mozilla used as a foundation for projects like these. Congrats to Mark for building such a simple and useful tool, and thanks.
[1] There is some privacy benefit to not being logged into Google all the time -- namely, that your searches are not associated with the cookie that maintains your login -- but it's a weak benefit. Google apparently also associates searches with IP addresses, and if your IP is fixed, as mine is, there's still a good likelihood that searches are discoverable. Blocking cookies only really helps if your IP address is a bad identifier (if your IP address changes, such as work vs. home or dynamic IP, or if your browsing is from the same IP as others', for instance behind NAT), but don't kid yourself about the anonymity this provides. That said, having a 'cookie sandbox,' which is effectively what WebRunner provides, is better than ignoring the problem; true privacy is usually gained by taking lots of small steps, not one big one.
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