“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.”
The Mac users amongst us who are interested in doing this kind of thing should take a look at Fluid, which creates standalone WebKit-based applications given a URL.
Given that Prism supports XUL, though, I guess there’s the potential for sites to have richer (and more “nativeâ€) UIs when running as a standalone application.
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
Firefox 3 is using 25 020/kb over here. just letting you know.
Firefox 3 is using 25 020/kb over here. just letting you know.
I have Firefox 3 also. It might use 25 MB when it launches but after an hour of heavy browsing use it will easily gain 25 MB or more. The memory use is definitely better than in the past.
Just another data point. My Epiphany uses 13m on start up. After having browsed for several hours, I’m at 39m.
To get these numbers, I am subtracting shared from resident memory, with swap temporarily turned off.
And that is using the gecko rendering engine. It will be interesting to see how it does with Webkit.
Just as a spot-test, IE7 here is using 83,672K as I type this. MOdern browsers are complex applications, and when you add flash/PDF plugins to the mix, you will always get high memory usage.
[On the other hand, the Logitech Set-Point software which is really just a hardware driver, takes 25MB ram during normal usage, that is way excessive, given what it is doing, and how badly it does it.]