WebRunner Becomes Prism – Roll Your Own WebApp

This article was written on October 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla Prism
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Do you remember the WebRunner browser that we wrote about last week? It was created by Mozilla as a way for websites, such as Google Reader, to provide a standalone application for their users. That way people don’t have to keep their main browser open all of the time if all they want to do is read news on Google Reader, or browse Facebook.

At the time shortcuts (called a WebApp) had to be downloaded for each of the sites that you wanted to use with WebRunner, or you could create your own which was slightly complicated. Now WebRunner has been moved to a Mozilla Labs project, and it was renamed to Prism.

There are two really great things that were introduced with the release of Prism: a create your own WebApp GUI, and inline spell checking. In the screenshot above you can see what the GUI looks like when you run Prism for the first time. It asks you for details on creating your own WebApp, and takes just seconds to do.

Tip: Enabling the location bar does not mean you’ll be able to type an address into it. The location bar is a read-only bar that accepts no input, so it doesn’t serve any purpose other than telling you what site you are currently on.

And spell checking! Oh how I love the inline spell checking. It is arguably Firefox’s best feature, and now you can use it in Prism. This is great news for anyone who wants to use Prism for writing emails. Not to mention Prism’s extremely low memory footprint, which means it will be friendly on your system’s resources.

I believe that Prism really has a great future, and it will be interesting to see if offline support ever finds its way into the project. That would really make it even more superb!

Prism Homepage [via Mark Finkle]
Kudos to RangingTrip for the tip!

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