Gibbs takes a look at Mozilla Prism, a tool for making Web sites into SSBs
It has been a busy week so far and it’s only Tuesday. What’s absorbed a lot of my time has been Web-related stuff and somehow I wound up taking a look at Mozilla Prism.
Prism is a free, open source tool for creating Site Specific Browsers (SSB) which, according to the Mozilla Labs Blog, “[are] designed to work exclusively with a single web application.” The blog continues “It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and other accoutrements of a traditional web browser. An SSB also offers tighter integration with the operating system and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser. Applications running in an SSB are therefore able to benefit from many of the advantages of the desktop and of the web at the same time.”
Those of you who have been around a while might remember some other tools for creating SSBs such as Bubbles along with more recent development systems such as Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight (both of the latter do a lot more than just create SSBs).
Prism is based on a number of interesting technologies including XUL and XBL. XUL is an acronym for “XML User Interface Language” and is a markup language for, yes, you guessed it, building user interfaces while XBL stands for “XML Binding Language” is an XML-based markup language “used to declare the behavior and look of XUL-widgets and XML elements.”
Both XUL and XBL are handled by something called XULRunner, another open source Mozilla project, that interprets and renders XUL and which is the beast at the heart of how Prism does the voodoo that it does so well.
Prism comes in two implementations: As a standalone application and as a Firefox plug-in. In its standalone application form you just launch the program and enter the target URL, the name that you want to call the SSB, and specify where the SSB is to be saved (desktop, Start menu, or quick launch toolbar). You can also select an icon for the SSB to use (the default is to use an enlarged version of the URL’s favicon (which usually turns out pretty ugly).
Other settings include whether the browser navigation bar and status messages and progress display are shown, whether navigation keys are enabled, and if the SSB should be displayed in the notification area.
I have several Google Voice accounts and switching between them using a single browser requires logging in as a different user to check each one. I wondered how separate each SSB was because if each one was truly isolated and I checked the “Keep me logged in” option when I logged in to Voice then I could, in theory, have a separate browser window open to each account.
I’m happy to report that this appears to work just fine! I now have SSBs not only for each of my Google Voice accounts as well as my Google Calendar, the GeoMAC wildfire service (kind of useful out here in California), and several other online services I find useful.
Where Prism shines is where the target Web site can remember your login details; then accessing the service is as simple as starting an SSB. Where Prism disappoints is in not being completely compatible with all of the Firefox plug-ins; for example, Roboform, one of my favorite browser enhancements, doesn’t work with Prism. I’d also like to be able to lock the size and location of the SSB window.
Bottom line: Mozilla Prism is really interesting and really useful. I’ll give it a rating of 4.5.
Gibbs browses a lot in Ventura, Calif. Your URL should be gearhead@gibbs.com.
