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Mobile Site Desktop Launcher

Facebook used to have a lightweight version at lite.facebook.com that was designed to be used on desktops with 56kbps connection speeds. You can imagine that that was quite the narrow use case, so it’s no surprise that they discontinued it. But it was nice to have as it was much less cluttered than their regular homepage.

I found myself lamenting the loss of lite.facebook.com one day when I navigated to the mobile site on my desktop. I was just as fast. It would be a viable replacement if not for the fact that it stretched all content to the full width of the browser.

Today this idea coalesced and I realized that it might be nice to have a desktop homepage that consisted of multiple columns of mobile sites. It would be sort of like iGoogle, but better in a lot of ways.

I mocked this up with iframes and here’s the result.

Screenshot from 2013-06-06 13:51:31

iframes are not a great way to do this. I think the most proper way would be with Web Components, which were announced at the most recent Google I/O.

Contact me if you’re interested in this. As it is I just wanted a proof of concept. I don’t see this as something I would use myself.