#FF00AA

If you’ve been wondering why you should be using Fluid, which makes site-specific instances of the WebKit browser (i.e., mini-Safari applications), here’s one reason that’s been true since the beginning, and the only reason I was using it: the best way to use Leopard’s Spaces is to assign each application to a space, and Fluid lets you create individual browsers that you can assign to separate spaces. (I may have already blogged that.)

But now there’s another reason, and I’d dub it “Holy shit” but they call it “Cover Flow,” unimaginatively enough:

If you use a Fluid browser to go to Google, Digg, Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr and a bunch of other sites, you can display a Cover Flow pane (which you can also set to show in a palette or HUD panel) that preloads all the pages linked from your results list, or friends list, or whatever. Which you can then double-click to open either in Fluid or your system browser, depending how you configured Fluid. And the best part is, it’s customizable — well, it’s supposed to be, but the add/remove buttons don’t seem to work in this version. In theory, though, it seems quite simple and clever: give a URL (with wildcards) the filter must apply to, and tell Fluid the CSS path to the relevant links, and it will fetch the URLs. (For instance, for http://*google.com/search*, it’s #res h2.r a, apparently.)

I only wish it was a Safari plugin instead. But Apple doesn’t want Safari to have plugins. (Isn’t there either a browser or a plugin that displays your browsing history or your tabs in Cover Flow? Well, it’s not nearly as cool anyway. And let’s not mention the search engine that displays its result in a Flash carousel; it’s not comparable.)

Oh, and I know, prefetching links is evil. But when it’s for something as cool as Cover Flow, who cares?