'Fluidize' Your Favorite Web Apps

Ever since the advent of tabbed browsing, I've had this naggging problem with having too many open tabs in Firefox. I typically have 15 tabs open at a time. For whatever reason, I seem to have this aversion to closing tabs. In all fairness though, part of this proliferation of tabs has to do with the fact that many of my 'critical' apps are web based. For example, at Bizo, we use the google apps stack: gmail, google docs, google calendar, google sites, fogbugz for project management and bug tracking, and hyperic for monitoring our applications.

There have been numerous times where I've been reading some documentation in one tab and then needed to look at something in gmail. This process requires that I:

1. find the tab that has gmail on it
2. do what I need to do in gmail
3. navigate back to the original tab

Because I have so many tabs open, I found that this process was taking entirely too long and slowing me down.

Not too long ago, I came across Fluid and realized that this might be an answer to my problem. The basic premise of Fluid is that you can elevate the status of any web application into a desktop application by wrapping the web application with a Site Specific Browser (SSB). Brilliant!

Since then, I've 'fluidized' some of my most frequently used web apps and it has eliminated the need to find the browser tab with 'application x' on it. Now, I can just take comfort in the fact that the application is in my dock waiting for me. Sweet.

This is a screenshot of the part of my dock that has been fluidized:
from left to right: gmail, gcal, gdocs, fogbugz, hyperic





I highly recommend Fluid, it's a great little product.