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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.
- a download is available for the Windows platform (↩)
- there is talk already of Linux and Mac ports to come (↩)
- the obvious warning is that this is a trivially easy way to break the application (↩)
- no sense removing functionality whilst changing options (↩)
- setting network.proxy.type to 1 enables proxy, 2 for autoconfig (↩)
- no greasemonkey scripts or extensions (↩)
"My social network is complex. It’s multi-layered, it moves in many directions. It means different things in different situations. You think your site can handle all that? I don’t think so." — Amen brother.
"Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again." — a fantastic article on type management through CSS, using @font-face and hosted typefaces.
"When all was said and done shawnblanc.net looked exactly like it did before." — another convert, Shawn Blanc, to the same awesome mediatemple (gs) product used here. And the move had the best possible result; business as usual.
"Antipiracy agency MediaDefender strongly denies recent claims that it set up an entrapment scheme in order to catch so-called pirates downloading illegal movies and software." — a honey pot is one thing, entrapment via malware? .. quite another.
"Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more." — pownce is kinda cool.. and I have a few invites to give away - leave a comment to score one. ;)
"If you’ve never been good at anything in your life, why would murder be any different?" — David Hewlett’s comic vision of familiy and murder gone so very horribly wrong.. top stuff!
"Google announced the launch of Version 2 of Google Analytics today. Over the next few weeks Google will upgrade current GA users to the new version." — fantastic article on the latest version of analytics, that boosts some *very* cool features.
"It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design. And nobody is better qualified than the readers of A List Apart to provide the answers." — Have your say in the 2007 ALA Web Design Survey.. your view still matters.
Is it me, or has google’s reader just had a [so far] unannounced, subtle yet highly user friendly UI change to both the subscription pane and articles list?
It’s happened in the last few hours and the enhancements really, do, honestly, make a massive difference - particularly when you compare to the older UI design:
This is a classic example of why I left dreamhost for (mt).
Since only one of our three data centers is losing power, not all servers will be shut down. Unfortunately, our core routers and our upstream providers are in that data center, so there will be no network to any servers during the window. #
Despite the on-going problems with unexpected router and network issues, taking large numbers of their hosting systems out, Dreamhost still don’t get that the above is a real problem that needs a real solution.
