WebRunner 0.5 - Now With More Power
I am really impressed by how many people seem to be using WebRunner ([1] & [2]). Personally, I still use it everyday to run GMail and Zimbra. Along the way, I had noticed some small quirks and painful bugs. The download bug (click a download link and get a XUL error message) was the one I hated the most. The window title bug (multiple WebRunner instances would cause the window title to change) was a close second.
I finally got around to fixing those and got ready to make a small release. Then I get an email from Wladimir Palant (of Adblock Plus fame). Seems Wladimir has been using WebRunner too and he also had a list of fixes and features. So I rolled his changes in with mine and the result is WebRunner 0.5:
- Downloads now work without the XUL error
- Better window title tracking
- Context menu enable/disable logic is better
- Added simple Print support via context menu
- Added About support via context menu - useful for checking XULRunner runtime version
- Added web application profile support - parameters for a web app can be saved to an INI-style *.webapp file. Several profiles are included in the distributions. Parameters include:
- uri - the uri/url of the web app (http://mail.google.com)
- icon - the icon you want to use for the WebRunner window when running this web app
- showstatus - turns the statusbar on or off for this web app
- showlocation - turns the readonly location bar on or off for this web app
- enablenavigation - turns the hotkey history navigation (ALT+LEFT, ALT+RIGHT and ALT+HOME) on or off for this web app
The installer can configure Windows to associate *.webapp files with WebRunner. This means that when you double-click or launch a *.webapp file, WebRunner is launched and automatically opens the web application. Pretty cool.
I am somewhat excited to see what can be done with WebRunner. I am thinking that we could turn on extension manager in WebRunner and use extensions to provide some web application customization. Also, I see WebRunner becoming more of a desktop platform for running web applications. What’s stopping WebRunner from doing what Adobe AIR does - only better and on Linux and with native code support and with extension support.
I am going to see if we can get WebRunner hosted in a Mozilla SVN repository as well. That would make it easier for people to contribute code.
Install: webrunner-0.5-win32.exe (4.9 MB) Source: webrunner-0.5-src.zip