[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“Yes, I know. The web in awash with standalone desktop
clients for tweeting, denting, YouTubing and e-mail. Many of them
are bulging with rich feature sets but they all require to be
launched separately and consume memory and processor cycles. If you
visit websites like Twitter, Identica and Gmail you are running
multiple tabs in your browser. I find that a bit tiresome and some
of the very clever people at Mozilla do too. Like Chief Dan George
in The Outlaw Josey Wales I’m always looking to get an edge and it
might just be that Raindrop, Mozilla’s latest brainchild, provides
it. I wanted that edge and I was prepared to jump through a few
hoops to get it. But what exactly is Raindrop?“Raindrop is software that runs as a web application inside any
HTML5-enabled browser and concentrates the social web in that
canvas. This means that Raindrop will run in Firefox,
Chrome/Chromium and Safari. Just for the hell of it, I tried it on
Konqueror (4.3.2), Flock, Opera and Kazehakase — with varying
results in terms of display layout. One nice feature of running
Raindrop in Chromium is that you can create a desktop application
for it which will then run as a separate web application in a
uncluttered window of its own (think Mozilla Prism here). You can
download and install it as a Firefox addon or as a stand alone
application. I’m glad to report that Raindrop will not work with
Internet Explorer as it is not HTML5 compliant (but Google has
served up Explorer Canvas project which enables the canvas
tag).”