Is Chrome a Prism Killer?
September 11, 2008 – 5:41 pmI have my Twitter set up to show me all tweets with the word “prism” in them, and over the past few days I’ve seen a surprising number along the lines of “I’m dumping Prism in favor of Chrome web apps”. This is how I first found out how badly my initial Chrome post missed the mark. I had hypothesized that Google was positioning itself in contrast to products like Prism and Fluid (and, more recently Safari) that let you create desktop shortcuts for web apps. As it transpires, Chrome permits exactly this and does so rather well.
So is Prism dead in the water? It has one clear advantage over Chrome, which is that it runs on Linux and Mac. (I’ll be ranting more about that tomorrow.) Also, Prism has a lot of cool bells and whistles (tray icons and menus, popup alerts, etc.). Google’s approach is better integrated with the browser, but there is a Firefox extension that accomplishes essentially the same thing. (And yes, I really must update it to work with Firefox 3.0.1.)
The main advantage of Chrome is that its architecture was conceived in advance to provide Prism-like functionality. One of the biggest challenges with Prism has been to bring its functionality up to the level of a modern web browser. Rendering web pages is a no brainer for any XULRunner application, but people have come to expect much more from a browser. There is a whole slew of bugs filed for Prism for everything from type-ahead find to proxy and security certification management.
The problem, in a nutshell, is the current dichotomy in the Mozilla platform between XULRunner, which offers all the nuts-and-bolts to build a browser-like app, and Firefox, which is a specific browser implementation. Ideally there would be an intermediate layer which gives you a complete browser without all the Firefox-specific stuff. From my perspective, the only thing that should be specific to Firefox is the user interface.
Rearchitecting Firefox in this way would be a massive effort, of course. (Consider the difficulty just getting tab browsing implemented in a way that lets different browsers use a common implementation.) In the meantime, a solution might be to base Prism on Firefox instead of XULRunner. In this way, we would get all the browser functionality for free. The problem is then flipped on its head, since we would need to find a way to hide anything Firefox-specific (including most of the user interface). Considering the ambitious improvements the Mozilla platform has benefited from recently, a restructuring of the browser functionality is perhaps not out of the question. However, moving Prism onto Firefox (something we’ve already discussed) is doubtless a more expedient approach that would immediately bring Prism up to the level of Chrome web apps (but with all the advantages mentioned earlier).
Another issue is that it is still too difficult to add the bells and whistles to Prism apps that make them really shine. We need more documentation and examples (something that has been on my to do list for far too long). Ideally, we would have a library of ready-made customizations for popular web apps that users could access directly, similiar to the library of scripts available for Greasmonkey. Chrome certainly doesn’t render Prism obsolete, but it does make it clearer how much work we still have to do.
12 Responses to “Is Chrome a Prism Killer?”
I’ve always been astonished why Prism gets so little love from Mozilla (at least it seems to me to be like that) regarding its potential.
It’s got tray menus? Where’s the doc? Does it work on Linux, too? Where are some newer builds? The official dist is still the old 0.9.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but Prism seems to be moving so slow.
Chrome: One thing worth noting is that it’s got Gears installed by default (will support notifications, offline functionality etc.).
Does Gears work with Prism?
By Chris on Sep 11, 2008
So is Prism dead in the water? It has one clear advantage over Chrome, which is that it runs on Linux and Mac.
Only temporarily, isn’t it? Chrome is supposed to support both those platforms, even if no official releases exist yet…
By Simon on Sep 11, 2008
I have to agree with the other Chris. Where are updated builds of Prism? I’ve been using the same extension since March, and it doesn’t officially support Firefox 3.0.1. What’s up with that?
And I would still use it, but the icons it creates look horrible! I don’t want those on my desktop.
Maybe if Prism had some continual development, I’d be happier with it. But nothing since March.
By Other Chris on Sep 12, 2008
Simon’s correct, Chrome will be on Linux and Mac OS X in time. Their Windows version was the first one started, and is currently the only one you can actually build a functioning browser on. Their Linux and Mac teams didn’t get to work until the Windows team had put the basics together.
By MattW on Sep 12, 2008
One advantage that Prism has is XUL. For remote XUL developers Prism provides a simple deployment option when full-blown Firefox can’t be considered for some reason.
I’d like to see it made easier for a Prism bundle to include XUL that can target the browser content (with some sandboxing or security warning). This would allow a Prism application to easily have additional UI content which is tailored to work with the target application, but which looks and feels like native widgets.
Consider, for example, being able to provide a XUL menu in your GMail Prism bundle which makes the resultant webapp seem more like a traditional desktop application. This is something that Google Chrome can’t do, and could be a killer feature for Prism.
By MarkC on Sep 12, 2008
Has Prism been improved on the Mac? I really want to run GMail in Prism but the last two releases have worked very badly on the Mac (after the first time using it the shortcut doesn’t work and one must start over). Thus, I’ve started using Fluid, which is much more polished, but it seems to have some quirks running GMail. I’ll definately try Chrome when it gets to the Mac, although I really would rather use Prism.
By Bob on Sep 13, 2008
Have you tried Prism 0.9.1? I use it for Gmail on Mac and I love it.
By Matthew Gertner on Sep 13, 2008
Have you tried Prism 0.9.1? I use it for Gmail on Mac and I love it.
The Prism extension for Firefox is version 0.2. Again, how about an update?
By Other Chris on Sep 13, 2008
Done: http://browsing.justdiscourse.com/2008/09/15/prism-extension-for-firefox-30x/
By Matthew Gertner on Sep 15, 2008
I think Google’s only advantage (and not that it’s small) right now is that its desktopize option is already in the hands of millions.
But neither Prism, nor Chrome’s implementation is that compelling at this point. I believe there’s a long race ahead. Sandboxing a web app and adding an icon is cool, but not even starting to replicate the desktop experience and I find it very difficult for this to happen on its own.
Instead, I would like to see some standardized XML format that allows a web site to tell a browser what to do to properly desktopize the web version.
For example: (imagine it as XML)
large-icon:http://mysite.com/big_logo.png
small-icon:http://mysite.com/small_logo.png
title:My Site’s Cool App
tooltip:My Site’s Cool App
shell-extensions:Share on Twitter, http://mysite.com/share.php, any-file
shell-extensions:Upload photo to MySite, http://mysite.com/photo-upload.php, *.jpg *.gif *.png
protocol-handler-for: mailto:, im:, irc:, ircs:
content-handler-for: image/png, image/jpg
require-offline-space: 50MB
window-min-size:640×480
allow-tabs:off
And so on. Then a web developer could add and be done.
By Percy on Sep 15, 2008
So WordPress ate my HTML.
It should have read: “And so on. Then a web developer could add a link tag to the page header for the specific OS and be done.”
By Percy on Sep 16, 2008