A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Update Prism Test Version for Windows

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

It was brought to my attention that the regprot.exe file delivered with the latest test version of Prism (on Windows) in order to implement custom protocol handlers can cause registry damage. This should never happen during normal Prism usage, but it might if you accidentally run the program directly. This ...

Prism Test Version Available for Download

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I've posted test versions of Prism for those who want to play around with the features and improvements I mentioned in my last post. These are untested, potentially unstable and possibly just downright broken, so please try them at your own risk. Do let us know if you run into ...

Mozilla Prism Update

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

We've been hard at work on Prism since the 0.9 release in March, and there is a bunch of fancy new features nearing completion. Once we've finished testing and tweaking the code, I'll make some preliminary builds available for folks to hammer on. Here's a run down of what's new, with ...

Redrawing the Browser’s Borders

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Traditionally browsing architectures have had a rather arbitrary separation between the rendering engine (suitable for embedding and reuse) and the browser user interface (not so much). These terms are a bit misleading because "rendering" necessarily entails far more than just painting HTML on the screen; the core engine is likely ...

Deconstructing Rich Internet Applications

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

A post by my Prism partner in crime Mark Finkle sent me spiraling back in time along an interlocking blogathon of attempts to nail down the term Rich Internet Application. Intense speed-reading of so many mammoth posts can scar the psyche, so let me paraphrase them and save you the ...

Another TechCrunch Guest Post on Single-Site Browsers

Monday, April 7th, 2008

My first guest post for TechCrunch, on the subject of single-site browsers, attracted a lot of interest and no small number of questions. Without seeing them in action, it's pretty hard to grasp what's so great about what sounds like a stripped down, less functional version of a normal web ...

SlimTimer and Prism, a Case Study

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

In my new incarnation as an independent software development consultant (read: programmer who works in his pajamas), I need to track the hours that I spend working for my clients. I've been using SlimTimer, a simple but wholly sufficient web app (highly recommended). It displays a nifty floating browser window ...

Zimbra Adopts Prism

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

In my first article about site-specific browsers, I concluded with a somewhat conservative assessment of the state of the technology: It’s extremely early days for all of these products. I wouldn’t recommend any of them for use by mainstream users, but if you’re technically minded enough to be reading this you’re ...

Browser Trends: Site-Specific Browsers

Monday, January 14th, 2008

One thing that clearly differentiates web apps from their desktop counterparts is that the former run inside a tab or page in the web browser rather than in their own process. This has a number of drawbacks, several of which are elegantly set forth in the blog post announcing the ...