In case you’ve missed it, possibly the hottest trend on the Web today (March 23, 2007) is encapsulating web applications in the form of widgets that can be inserted everywhere from MySpace to WordPress to the desktop itself. Many even offer ‘Grab It’ type features that allow users to embed (or email) widgets they find online into their own blogs and community sites, making widgets a perfect viral marketing tool. Key players like Clearspring, yourminis and (of course) Microsoft are betting (so far, successfully) that these baubles will capture the imagination of advertisers and user-developers alike. And, with the recent (alpha) release of Apollo, it appears that Adobe is also well positioned to play a significant role in widget development.

As for the title of this post ‘Browser-in-Browser! What …’, I recently found a widget called ‘Bitty Browser‘ that allows you to embed a smaller browser within a web page (or blog post!), in your… uh… browser. Yes, this seems a bit absurd when you think about it. Why would I need to embed a browser inside a browser window? Modern browsers have tabs (and tile view options), so I don’t need another browser to view multiple pages. But here’s where it gets interesting (and even more bizarre), the real benefit (and arguably the purpose) of Bitty Browser is that it allows you to widgetize (yeah, I said it – widgetize) virtually any web page or application. Simply copy and paste some Bitty-generated script into your page to embed the content of your choice into your own custom widget. Of course you could do the same thing yourself with a bit of <embed> or <iframe> scripting, but where’s the fun in that? BTW, if you want to create your own scripts and do away with the ‘browser’ feature, the scripts generated by Bitty make excellent templates.