Gadgetopia

FoxGlove: Google Apps Portal: This is, I believe, the next evolution in the Single-Site Browser (SSB) phenomenon. Not only are you running Google Apps in a different instance, but that instance is customized with special functionality specifically for the app it’s intended to run.

And this is why I so totally love FoxGlove. FoxGlove is a customized Firefox Portable installation to tightly integrate with Google Apps. As you can see, FoxGlove is complete not only with add-ons that will enhance and integrate Google Apps in Firefox, but it also has a Chrome-like theme, custom homepages (that auto-load in tabs), and web site favicons.

I discussed before how I thought larger Web apps should offer customized browser environments for their apps:

What I’d like to see in these apps is a way to give Web sites “superpowers” that they wouldn’t normally have, like access to your local file system or registry. While the security implications are daunting, this is one of the last miles to bridging the gap between local and remote applications.

However, I never thought of using Firefox extensions for it, which only makes sense.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Salesforce lately. That’s an app monolithic enough to need something like this.