Linked by David Adams on Sat 8th Mar 2008 00:21 UTC
Mozilla & Gecko clones "Mozilla's greatest success to date has come from its online efforts with the Firefox web browser. Since at least October of last year they've been working on the Mozilla Prism effort to bring the online experience to the desktop. That effort is taking a major step forward today. Instead of struggling with Mozilla Prism to create a standalone desktop version of a Web app, there is now a point and click browser plugin to do the magic."
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my tryout
by buff on Sat 8th Mar 2008 14:26 UTC
buff
Member since:
2005-11-12

I downloaded and installed it on Linux (Fedora 8/XFCE). It appeared to work well. I ran the prism application and a dialog box asked me to enter the URL and name for the web application. I gave it the URL for Google Calendar. I've been using it for the last two days. I find myself tending to use Firefox more since I have a keyword shortcut for Calendar and Gmail. I am not really seeing an advantage over just using the browser. There is a difference in memory use. Prism is consuming about 25 MB with Google Calendar running. Firefox with one tab open browsing OS News is using 75 MB. I launched another Prism application, Gmail, and it consumed about 16 MB. If you are not doing a lot of browsing but just use a collection of web applications it does have a memory advantage.

On Linux I noticed it created a .prism hidden directory which contains the web app data, cache, etc.

One minor annoyance is that I couldn't find a way to change the font size. There is a small Tools menu for each Prism window but I didn't see a way to change the font size. The keyboard shortcuts for changing font size also don't work. Some of this functionality could be added back by writing an extension.

Edited 2008-03-08 14:37 UTC