Mozilla Prism

By basd on May 25, 2009 | In cloud computing

Following up on an earlier post, I note that Mozilla has released a Prism beta that allows individual webpages (eg., GMail) to be placed on the desktop as an application.

...

And this from the mission statement:

"Much of what we used to accomplish using an application running locally on our computers is moving into the web browser."

Something to watch.

____________________

Well, other than it didn't work for me. It created a desktop icon -- but the icon doesn't do anything other than launch my default browser -- even if my browser is already running -- and another application with the correct icon that simply dies after awhile. Maybe I am unclear on the concept.

____________________

Later update: So, since it wouldn't work for me, I tried setting up a new profile and running my "application" pages in a different profile.

This sort of works, but there are issues. If there is an instance of Firefox running, launching additional firefox URLs via an icon starts the new version in the previously running Firefox. So, what I need to do is launch my default Firefox first, then all of my regular URLs (launched from icons) will open in tabs in my default Firefox.

Then, to get my "app" to run, in the "app" profile, I run this: firefox -P apps [url] -no-remote.

This allows launching the second session of Firefox, and it will launch with whatever preferences I have set up in the new "apps" profile.

Unfortunately, THE NEXT application won't launch unless I make yet another profile for it -- and creating separate profiles for each application (webpage) seems very cumbersome. But, the -P will only launch in a specific profile if no instance of Firefox is running. And, -no-remote locks the session -- if another app tries to launch in this session, it will be told that firefox is already running and can't start.

Lastly, the other feature that would seemingly come from Prism is that ability to label the individual applications as separate applications with separate icons. This is a somewhat trivial distinction, but it will (I think) prevent grouping the applications as instances of Firefox in the Plasma panel; and will provide separate icons for recognition of which is which.

So, progress slightly made, but not really.