Fluid

With three quick releases, Fluid has been getting a lot of attention. Given that it is Leopard only, I haven't tried it yet, but looking at the feature list, it doesn't seem to offer much more than Prism, Mozilla Labs version of the same concept (on which Fluid was inspired).

The best update so far was 0.3 adding auto-updates via Sparkle.

My take on Prism and Fluid, is that they don't go far enough. This is just a clever way to run a browser with a customized homepage, in a different process space. Its nice, but not good enough.

To really be helpful, I would suggest a couple of features:

• Webapps should be able to replace the Menubar with something specific to them, including keyboard shortcuts. Selections of menu items should be forward to the Webapp via Javascript events;
• Include some sort of offline plugin by default. I would suggest Google Gears just because its the most complete right now;
• New DOM objects to generate Growl notifications;
• New DOM objects to access Address Book and Calendar APIs: when a application tries to access those APIs, access would have to be approved.

I also though of including a AppleScript bridge in that list, but I'm not a big user of AppleScript, so I'll leave it out for now.