Firefox 3 Beta 4 and Prism 0.9 Work Very Well

As promised, here is a follow up on my previous post about running the latest version of Prism as an extension. Good news is: Prism on Ubuntu actually works now.

It would seem that installing Firefox 3 beta 4 from the Mozilla site solved a lot of the problems I was having. So far I haven't had any problems creating Webapp shortcuts for the Google Apps I use and as an added bonus it is easy to select an alternative icon (the favicon is a bit too small for some uses).

The most noticeable improvement is really not Prism related but due to the improvements in the Gecko Platform (see beta 4 release notes). Webapps start significantly faster now.

Another nice feature is that Prism instances run in a separate process now. It used be that all Webapps shared the same process. A poorly written Webapp should not be able to take down all Prism instances (in theory). Additionally, since cookies are isolated to each instance of Prism the chance of one Webapp running in Prism making an XSRF is greatly reduced since it won't have access to session cookies from other Webapps.

Happy Webapping

Prism: Now an Extension for Firefox 3

Mozilla has announced that Prism version 0.9 is now available as an extension for Firefox 3. See the official Mozilla Labs announcement or Marke Finkle's Blog for more information.

Installing the extension is simple but does require Firefox 3 since it relies on Firefox 3's ability to allow other applications to use its XULRunner platform. As an Ubuntu user, the simplest way to install Firefox 3 is to enable the Unsupported Updates Repository and use Synaptic. Update: Save yourself some headaches with the Prism extension and follow the instructions at Tombuntu (still very simple and applies to Firefox beta 4 too). Once installed, start Firefox 3 and install Prism.

My first (and only) attempt at converting a website to an application failed. The problem was that the wizard wouldn't actually save the Web Application icon to the desktop. And without this I saw no way to launch Prism. I hope this is a Linux specific bug that will be ironed out soon. I'll post again once I get to play with Prism more.

As an aside, using Firefox 3 was nice. Compared to Firefox 2, it felt a lot snappier and faster at rendering pages. Hopefully some lagging extensions will support Firefox 3 soon.

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.

WebRunner is Now Prism and an Official Mozilla Labs Project

If you are a regular reader of Planet Mozilla this is not news to you. However, if you are not a reader but you are interested in seeing how Web Applications will evolve, then the news of Prism becoming an official Mozilla Labs project might interest you.

Prism is currently only available for Windows but this should change in the next week or so with the release of a Linux and Mac version. However, WebRunner (the precursor to Prism) is available for all platforms now. My advice is to wait until Prism is available on your platform as it has a number of bug fixes that have made WebRunner annoying to use (no spell checker being the biggest). My experience with WebRunner has been mixed. The idea is good, but the project was very much in its infancy and not ready to replace Firefox. The fact that Prism is an official project now bodes well for its future and I look forward to new versions.

The big question, however, is: how many more times will WebRunner/Prism be renamed?