Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Productivity, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

Do you have Gmail perma-tabbed in your browser window? Are you a Google Docs devotee? Is Facebook bookmarked as your home page?

If you nodded your head to any of the above questions (or blushed in embarrassment from your web 2.0 addictions), then Fluid is something you should take a look at.

Fluid, a beta download for Mac OS X Leopard, creates Site Specific Browsers that run as independent desktop applications. In other words, you can put a Gmail browser page on your desktop, complete with its own customizable dock icon and standard menu bar. The best thing is, if Firefox (or any web browser) should happen to crash, your desktop application is untouched.

So how does it work?

Launch Fluid to see a small display window where you can specify the URL of the webapp, give the window a name, and choose a customized or default icon (there’s even a whole Flickr group of downloadable high-res icons). Click “create,” and then launch your application. That’s all there is to it.

Fluid gets its inspiration from Prism, a project by Mozilla labs. However, because Fluid is Mac only, and is based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine, it claims a more native look and feel over Prism.

Fluid is currently in beta (version 0.6), and requires Leopard.

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