Turn Your Web App to Be Your Desktop App
Bubbles is an interesting new solution that provides a bridge between rich web applications and the desktop. While still in development, Windows users can download and install it for free. Then they can set up their favorite web applications (Gmail, Flickr, 30boxes, etc.) to run as programs on their start bar. Then it’s as simple as hitting alt-tab to cycle through them alongside your other client applications.
When you first run Bubbles, you’ll see a list of web sites which you can open with the application. You can also add any page you want just by entering the URL. You can start a web app by clicking the “Go” button and you should see icons for each application pop up in your Windows system tray. Click on one to bring up the web app of your choice. Clicking the X bar doesn’t close the window, but minimizes it to the system tray. In order to really close a window you’ll need to right-click on its icon and select close.
Bubbles appears to use less memory than Firefox when accessing some web pages like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. But we noticed a window running Google Reader quickly grew to use 50MB. Overall Bubbles seems like a slick and easy to use alternative to Mozilla Prism. But there is room for improvement. For example, when you click on a link in a Bubble window, instead of opening a new Bubble, the program opens your default web browser, which sort of defeats the purpose if you want to do anything besides read web pages.
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