I’ve been wanting a slim browser for quite some time, and Mozilla’s new WebRunner browser is definitely just that. Mozilla cutout all of the frills to give people a one site at a time browsing experience that doesn’t even have an Address Bar, bookmarks, forward/back operations, or many other things that you have become accustomed to a browser having.
The features include:
- Context menu for basic clipboard and selection operations
- Simple Print support
- Uses the latest rendering engine (same one used in Firefox 3 nightlies)
- Show float-over link destinations in the statusbar so users can see where the link will take them
- Support download manager
So how do you open a website? WebRunner works with a thing they call “bundles,” and those are special kinds of files that has been zipped and the extension changed to “webapp.” The INI file that holds the configuration information looks something like this:
[Parameters]
id=twitter@developer.mozilla.org
uri=http://www.twitter.com/
icon=twitter
status=yes
location=no
sidebar=no
navigation=no
As of right now bundles have been made for most of Google’s services, Meebo, Bloglines, and more.
Even if you do enable things like the sidebar or location bar you still won’t be able to do anything with them. They are virtually useless as of right now, and for good reason. By trimming out all of these features they are able to ship this browser with an extremely low memory footprint, and in the case of Twitter it consumed a mere 15MB of memory while running.
Oh, and did I mention that there are no tabs? Yeah, that’s a bit unfortunate, but you can have multiple windows open at the same time. The memory usage seems to be about half of what Firefox is, which makes it a good alternative for the things you leave open all of the time (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, etc…). If only they slapped a working Address Bar in there then this thing would be a lot more useful. 
It’s pretty obvious that this browser is geared towards Web 2.0 services that don’t have the time nor the money to create their own desktop application. WebRunner doesn’t offer the ability to take those sites offline, but it does provide a clutter-free way for people to interact with the services.
Kudos to Pieter for the tip!
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Tags: Freeware, Software, Web Sites, Applications, Browser, Downloads, Features, Mozilla
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I have been using WebRunner for a while now. Mainly Google Apps. I keep minimized to my system tray, (using Power Menu), Gmail, GCal, Notebook, Reader, and Docs. WebRunner, as a single process, runs all 5 apps at around 40mb. I am constantly restarting Firefox testing extensions, so this is ideal for me.
6MBs is still a lot for such an application. Opera is smaller in size to install and it’s a full feature browser+mail.
Also Webrunner still has a larger memory footprint compared with both Opera and Maxthon 2.
Considering that this is only a Site Specific Browser (SSB), it should both be smaller in size and use way less RAM. This proves once more how bloated Firefox is even with just the very basic feature(s)(that is just displaying a single website and nothing more!)
A quick little test. Let’s not forget that these are memory intensive websites/webapps. With these 5 webapps running - Gmail, Gcal, Docs, Notebook, and Reader. Running XP sp2. Try it out.
ie7 - 76 mb
Maxthon 2 - 72 mb
Opera - 62 mb ( yes still no Notebook support)
Fx - 50 mb (with 26 extensions)
WebRunner - 40 mb
Opera is indeed a full featured browser, but you have to look at it from all angles. If you only keep Google Reader open all day, for example, and do some casual browsing here and there it would be better to use WebRunner. The memory usage for having that one site open is much less than what Opera is, and if you’re not browsing the Web all day you can keep your browser closed then.
Good stats there. Thanks for pointing them out.
I just created a .webapp for DivShare. It works terrific, but just can’t seem to figure out how to apply their icon…
You’ll probably have to include the icon in the compressed .webapp file.
If you change navigation(or location)=no to yes I think it will show the address bar. I can’t remember which one it is.
I briefly mentioned that in the article, but even if you show the address bar you can’t actually use it. For some reason it isn’t a text box that you can type in.
The Location bar is not a textbox because I don’t want you to think you can type a URL into it and switch to another website. Use a browser for that
The Location bar is mainly to let the user see the current URL and copy/paste it to another application if they want to.
Thanks for the clarification Mark. I’m just glad that I’m not crazy.