Whilst shamelessly plugging a product for no apparent reason is not my forté, Xenocode is a world leader in virtualising applications. Today they announce the online availability of their Browser Sandbox suite of applications.
Put simply, it allows you to run instantly any popular web browser there is on the market, without downloading or installing the actual browser.
How? Why? The "how" I have no idea, but you do need a small plugin running on your system to get the code working. This is a few kilobytes tops, so regardless of what you think of this already, there's no way you can download a working, functional browser which is less than a megabyte.
Simply click and use, that's all there is to it. Take a look; multiple, simultaneous browsers running on my desktop without installing a single one. You'll notice Internet Explorer 6 on Vista, which in itself looks a little strange:
Web developers and multimedia students will surely reap the benefits of this ingenious website. Whilst this technology has been around for years, it seems only now have my eyes been opened to the wonders of application virtualisation.