Tohir Solomons

Appreciating Mozilla Prism

Posted on the June 15th, 2009 under Internet,Reflections/Thoughts,Software and Technology by Tohir

When Mozilla Prism was first launched, I honestly never gave it much thought as to it’s usefulness, or why anyone would want to use it. Today, it is such an essential tool for me. Let me explain.

What is Mozilla Prism?

Mozilla Prism is a tool that allows you to run web applications in a independent browser window. Take a website, and convert it into a “browser in a window”. Now this doesn’t sound too useful, and it doesn’t provide offline capability, etc.

But consider when you run a web-app like Gmail. It will either be in a tab or window of Firefox. Everytime, you want to check your mail, you need to switch between them. Furthermore, if Firefox happens to freeze or crash, it means you have to restart it and then open Gmail again.

By moving it to an independent browser window, means that it is unaffected by any issues Firefox may have. The other nice thing is that if you click on an external link in Mozilla Prism, it will automatically open it in your default browser. As it generally appears with as few/no toolbars, it also maximizes viewing space.

Lastly, Mozilla Prism supports extensions. The Firefox ones are not enabled by default, but this also makes it nice and fast to use.