A Firefox Hack You Can Live Without

DryerFoxVancouver-based developer Doug Schmidt has come up with one of the silliest (yet most amusing) browser hacks to come down the pike in a while: DryerFox. Using the new Adobe Apollo runtime, this little cross-platform application takes the web page of your choice and puts it in the dryer, leaving it spinning on your desktop. Meanwhile the page is still live: you can read it, click links, and otherwise interact with it (as long as the spinning doesn’t leave you too seasick).

Yes, it’s silly, but there’s a serious point to be made here as well. If you’re old enough, you may remember when Apple brought us fonts, and we were all subjected to the ransom note school of e-mail design for a few years. With the wave of tools like Apollo, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFX coming out, we’re going to have powerful visual design tools in the hands of developers who have little or no idea what works in graphic design.

While DryerFox is deliberately playful, I think we’d better be prepared for a few standout, innovative applications and a great many awful, garish mishmashes while people figure out how to use this stuff effectively. Please, if you’re one of the developers exploring this brave new world of powerful web scripting, think of the users!

P.S. – I know DryerFox uses WebKit, not Firefox, as its browsing engine. But Doug is right, the name was too good to pass up.

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