smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

There has been some recent activity around a re-born Mozilla application, previously named WebRunner, now called named Prism¹.

There is some good coverage of Prism, particularly via dailyapps, as well as developer notes, which all do a damn fine job of describing it’s purpose.

If you want to skip the detailed view, it can be most succinctly described as a lightweight XUL based Windows application² that provides a light-weight framework for web applications, such as Google’s Reader, or Gmail.

The idea being that many Web 2.0 apps don’t actually require a full web browser to function, features such as an address bar, favourites, back and home buttons are all handled within the web application itself, rendering them pointless.

Prism offers a feather-weight client that provides a simple interface to a web based application. Indeed it’s so light-weight that there are no built-in preference controls. Which is a bit of a conundrum when one is behind a firewall and needs to configure proxy settings, or needs to adjust further functionality within the software.

However, here’s a quick way to access all of the XUL Runner’s internal controls³ to configure such things as proxy server settings, due in part, to sharing the same kind of engine Firefox uses. Fire up prisim and it will ask you to specify the particularly web address to use, a name and so forth — try the following:

As indicated in the image above, set the URL to about:config, provide a descriptive name and enable all the features⁴. When the new applet is fired up, it will warn that it is about to provide access to the options page:

After that, you should see the complete set of variables and their settings. Just as in Firefox, non-default settings are in bold. In the example below, I have pulled up the proxy settings by refining the results displayed with the key phrase network.proxy:

With the right proxy settings⁵ I am now able to use this at work, as well as home. Moving forward I am sure there will be a simpler method to gain access to client preferences, but for now, this is a very quick-and-dirty process that works extremely well.

It’s certainly a fantastic way to separate out the applications so they run stand alone, without pushing down browser performance, one of my pet hates that has only worsened of late. Prism has one last card up it’s sleeve in this regard. It is very, very fast, indeed so much so that I have already migrated gmail, calendar and reader across, despite losing some functionality⁶.

The is further talk of custom CSS control and greasemonkey support, which could really open up a whole new way of accessing web based applications. All of which happens in a client designed from the ground up to support web based applications, rather than in web browsers where such features were never originally envisioned.

1. a download is available for the Windows platform (↩)
2. there is talk already of Linux and Mac ports to come (↩)
3. the obvious warning is that this is a trivially easy way to break the application (↩)
4. no sense removing functionality whilst changing options (↩)
5. setting network.proxy.type to 1 enables proxy, 2 for autoconfig (↩)
6. no greasemonkey scripts or extensions (↩)