Prism Available for Linux

As previously posted, the latest version of WebRunner has been released under the name Prism. Until recently, Prism was only available for Windows users but now Linux and Mac users can use Prism too. Running Web Apps in Prism has three advantages:

• Reduces the frequency of Firefox crashes. I'm not sure why Firefox crashes as often as it does but I suspect it has to do with all the extensions and running Web Apps like GMail all day long. Hopefully Firefox 3 will fix these problems, but isolating GMail to Prism has already helped a lot.
  
• Reduces the chance of a cross-site request forgery (xsrf) since cookies from Web Apps that run for a long time are not available to malicious sites (assuming you would come across a malicious site using your regular browser and not using Prism)
• Reduces needless browser UI elements, freeing up more space the the Web App itself.
  

I have been using WebRunner/Prism for a bunch of Web Apps I use and, generally, I have been happy with the results. The latest release under the Prism name has made some key improvements:

• Spell checker works all the time. I'm highly dependent on the spell checking feature in Firefox in order to compose semi-intelligent email. Suffice it to say, using GMail in WebRunner made for confusing, if not humorous, reading on behalf of my email recipients.
• The cursor is visible when composing email in GMail. Sounds weird but actually trying to write an email without a cursor is even weirder.
  
• Prism start-up time is faster. Not only compared to WebRunner but Firefox 2 as well. It also seems that Prism is able to load the Web App faster, but I have no tests to back this up.
• Favicons appear in the panel. Before the Prism release all Web Applications running in WebRunner used the same WebRunner icon. This improvement sounds trivial but is a big usability improvement, making it much easier to move between minimized applications.
  

There are a few annoyances/bugs with Prism worth noting:

• Opening multiple Web Applications simultaneously throws errors
  
• No Linux version of the favicon resizing/styling tool available to Windows users
  
• General rendering weirdness due to the fact that Prism uses the still-evolving Mozilla 1.9
• Lack of Prism documentation on webapp bundles that were used in WebRunner
• Cookies are shared between all Web Apps running in Prism. This is the norm for a browser, but leads to the xsrf vulnerability. Although less of a concern since most Web Apps running in Prism will be trusted, it would still be nice to tighten the security. Perhaps Web Apps launched from a webapp bundle instead of a uri could keep cookies isolated to themselves?
  

If you are a Web Developer and interested in seeing how users might be interacting with your Web Applications in the future, definitely give Prism a spin. Tombuntu posted instructions on installing WebRunner on Ubuntu and these are still applicable to Prism. Personally, I extracted the Prism archive to /opt/prism and then saved all webapp bundles in my home directory.