Fluid: Bring Web Apps to your Desktop

If you’re the type of person who works with certain web apps constantly, Fluid is just for you. Fluid allows you to create an application for any web app, raising your level of productivity, lowering you RAM usage, and much more! Fluid is a great way to create a web app on your desktop without writing a line of code. While you may think running a web app as an application might use more RAM, I found the opposite to be true. Since I find myself hanging around Facebook quite a bit, I created an app for it. With Facebook open in Safari with one tab open and no plugins used, I was using 63.07 MB of real memory. With the Fluid create app, only 35.12 MBs of real memory was utilized.

Fluid treats your favorite web apps just like normal apps; each getting an icon in the dock, appearing in Spotlight, etc. The default dock icon is the favicon of the website which is only a 16×16 image, making for a very low resolution icon. To get around this minor issue, users have created a Flickr pool of Fluid icons for common web apps. The pool is small, but maybe some of our readers can help it grow.

Fluid isn’t going to replace the web or become the new browser, but is going to make it much easier to access our favourite web services from our desktop. This concept of running web apps on your desktop was inspired by Prism (made by Mozilla Labs). Fluid uses WebKit to render the pages (versus the Gecko engine for Prism), but the concept of how it works is very similar to Prism. Mozilla Labs, the developers of Prism say that “unlike Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not trying to build a proprietary platform to replace the web.”

Fluid, which is currently in beta, can be downloaded for free from the developers website.