Designing or re-creating your websites so they behave more like native applications is an older concept that is realizing some true potential lately. The ability to serve up applications that live more natively on your computer, offer your customers a much more intuitive, integrated, and effective experience — leading to a much higher amount of traffic and time-spent on your brand. Browser makers approach this concept differently — Google Chrome has opted for a marketplace where users download and install Web apps as a separate experience to their website. Microsoft Internet Explorer has Pinned Sites, a set of features that make users feel like they have a native app experience. Mozilla Firefox has been experimenting with Prism, a native app that users install to launch websites directly.
Even though IE9 is relatively new, and I work on a MAC primarily, we have been exploring Pinned Sites.
You can find out all about it at http://buildmypinnedsite.com/
There is also a jQuery plugin to help make things easier http://plugins.jquery.com/project/pinify
It is a very good execution of how integrated websites that act like native applications, can work very well. So make sure to check it out, and learn how to design and develop native applications that blur the lines between the browser and the desktop.
