The lively dock: Web applications as live thumbnails

Abstract

For better or worse, the web browser has become a widely used target platform for software applications. In the era of web-based software, the web browser will serve as the primary user interface for end-user applications. In this paper, we introduce the Lively Dock, a user interface mechanism that can be used to host miniaturized yet active web applications in a web browser. The system is built as an extension to the Lively Kernel, a programming environment that runs inside a web browser without additional plug-in components. The Lively Dock makes it possible to easily manage a large number of simultaneously running web applications, widgets and other visual objects in the web browser. Consequently, the web browser can easily be used as a windowing environment.