Mozilla Prism is a Mozilla Lab product that available in both Firefox add-on version and stand-alone version. It has the ability to run web apps directly on the desktop using Firefox Gecko engine. Web apps that created using Prism can be placed onto the application dock and in the system tray.
This morning I remembered the use of Mozilla Prism is because of the performance of Ubuntu on my netbook. Firefox always freeze every time I refresh my Gmail webpage. I need to get rid of this issue, so it was the first to come to my mind to solve this problem: Mozilla Prism. I used Prism before on the Windows. I never tried it on GNU/Linux since I migrated to GNU/Linux one year ago. First I installed Prism as a Firefox add-on from Mozilla Prism website. It failed. The web apps created through this add-on simply failed to launch. It launched another instance of Firefox browser instead of a new minified version of Firefox. After its failure, I downloaded the stand-alone version of the app. It successfully launched the main conversion window directly in the extracted folder. However, it needs to manually type the URL address that you want to convert to a web app. After that, it launched a new minified Firefox version for each converted web app.
It runs and converts web apps on my 32-bit Ubuntu netbook without problem. However, the issues became to come up when I tried to run Prism on the 64-bit based Fedora. According to the Prism spec, it doesn’t have 64-bit version for GNU/Linux available yet. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work even I installed 32-bit components on my Fedora system. As far as I know, it couldn’t run on the 64-bit GNU/Linux system because it couldn’t load XPCOM and I couldn’t find any clue about what is XPCOM.
The overall performance of Prism compare to the standard Firefox browser is faster response and less freeze during the use of my gmail web app. I felt opening gmail is quicker and JavaScript becomes more responsive.
Prism is a good application to get the most out of the web apps. I hope Mozilla would continue to improve the usability of this app. The features I would like to see in the future version of Prism are to have ability to open the new window link directly inside the web app window or open a new minified Firefox window instead open in the regular Firefox browser window, to have more options in the Prism preferences dialog box, and to enable the new tab button as sell as enable Ctrl-T keyboard shortcut to open a new tab in the web app window.
That’s a bummer about the XPCOM error on 64-bit systems. I’ve been trying to get prism to run on 64 bit debian with no luck.
I haven’t tried Prism since switched to Ubuntu. I will try prism from Ubuntu repository.