TechLifeBlogged

A couple days ago I mentioned WebRunner, the chrome-less browser from Mozilla that lets you run web applications like Gmail and others as if they were stand alone applications. They are still on-line, just in their own distraction free window. I thought it might be interesting to see if the functionality could be ported over to a portable USB thumb drive. Turns out it really isn’t very hard.

First you need to download WebRunner if you don’t have it already. You will need to run the install but you don’t have to actually launch anything.

Next you need a USB drive. I use a ‘thumb’ drive. If you want you can just create a directory to simulate the thumb drive then move everything over once you get it all set. Plug in your drive to an empty USB port. For this example I am going to say the thumb drive presents itself as drive letter z: on your system. Yours will probably be different.

In the thumb drive you need to copy the whole c:\Program Files\WebRunner to the root of your thumb drive. So in this example you will have a new directory on the thumbdrive z:\WebRunner. If you want you can now uninstall WebRunner from your system. It is up to you.

Now is where it gets slightly tricky. You can’t use the short cuts that were created when you installed WebRunner because they point to a certain drive letter. If your move your USB drive the letter is sure to change. The trick I use it to create a batch file to accomplish the same thing as the short cut. Starting with Gmail, again in the root of your USB drive, create a batch file called start_gmail.bat in there put:

WebRunner\webrunner.exe -webapp WebRunner\gmail.webapp

save the batch file. You can create similar batch files to launch Google Docs by creating another batch file called start_docs.bat and editing the above to read:

WebRunner\webrunner.exe -webapp WebRunner\gdocs.webapp

Working with Local HTML files

One of the great uses of WebRunner is in conjunction with a local HTML file such as TiddlyWiki or one of it’s excellent derivatives, D3 or (the one I use) MonkeyGTD.

For this I have another folder on the root of my USB drive called MonkeyGTD. Inside that folder I have an html file called monkey.html. Calling this is just a little trickier because it is a File URL. I created another batch file in the root of my USB drive called start_tw.bat. In that batch file I put

WebRunner\webrunner.exe -uri file:///”%~dp0/MonkeyGTD/”monkey.html

A similar method can be used if you want to have a different web app such as NewsHutch be stand alone:

WebRunner\webrunner.exe -uri http://newshutch.com

If you followed all of the above you should have a drive that looks something like this:

Hopefully these tips were helpful to someone wanting to do this same thing. Let me know if you have done something different with WebRunner or your USB drive.