Separating services accessed with an Internet browser

Question

Nowadays Internet browsers is used not only to visit websites, but as a medium of using tools - from calendar, e-mail and documents (e.g. GoogleDocs) to a programming terminal (e.g. IPython Notebook).

However, a high number of browser windows (out of which some are almost always open) makes a mess (and for example it is No1 reason why I use a standalone program for my mail). No only it is harder to access it ("ah - it is the 2th tab in the 9th window") but also it makes it harder to release memory and more prone to crashes.

Is there any way to have separate services run as separate programs (and have links opened always in the program for actual browsing)?

I have MacOSX.

Answer 1

One option is to use different browsers for different purposes. I have both Firefox and Chrome installed on my home machines, and use them for different sites.

Also, Chrome can be configured to appear as if a web site were an application. Icon on the desktop, double click to open, and so on. I have GoogleDocs set up that way, and RememberTheMilk. I can't remember the keystrokes/commands offhand (and don't have Chrome at work) but it isn't difficult to find.

Answer 2

Fluid does exactly that: it lets you take any website and make it into a real Mac app that lives on the Dock.

Raven is also worth looking at. It's more of a normal browser, but it lets you "install" and organize web apps separately from your regular tabs (and also have multiple tabs open and group them with each of your web apps), which should make them a lot more manageable. In addition, for a lot of web apps they add features that make them easy to use (I haven't used Raven much so I can't provide more details here).