A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Prism and the Open Web Store

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Responding to Google's announcement last week of a Chrome Web Store, Jay Sullivan asks on the Mozilla Blog for ideas about an alternative Open Web App Store. This is something that I've been thinking about and discussing with Mark Finkle for a couple of years now in the context of ...

Prism 1.0b4, Fixes Rare Windows Registry Issue

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

A while back I blogged about a rare issue that occurred if a user clicked on the regprot.exe file included in Prism to handle protocol handler registration. I thought the issue had been fixed ages ago, but a couple of recent reports have led me to believe that it can ...

Prism for Firefox 3.6 on OS X, an Update

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Yesterday I posted about an issue using the new Prism for Firefox extension on OS X. Based on a suggestion from Chris Beard, I've implemented a workaround that fixes the problem. It's not the world's cleanest solution, but it is only needed until the next release of Firefox comes out ...

Prism, Firefox 3.6, OS X and dependentlibs.list

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

As we prepare to go live with Prism 1.ob3, I should mention that there is an issue with using the Prism extension in Firefox 3.6 on OS X. Prism uses the Firefox runtime (meaning the XUL, XPCOM and other libraries) for apps it creates. There is a small bug in ...

Ubuntu Build of Prism 1.0b3pre

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Succumbing to overwhelming pressure from the Linux community, I've built Prism 1.0b3pre on Ubuntu. Download the standalone version or Firefox extension. I'm very pleased to say that (for whatever reason) I was able to reproduce the infamous Ubuntu crash experienced by some users of Prism 1.0b2. Some research led me to a ...

New Prism 1.0b3pre Build, Now With Mozilla 1.9.2

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Based on feedback from my last post, I fixed the extension version numbers (including the Firefox maxVersion) in Prism 1.0b3pre. I also decided to build on top of Mozilla 1.9.2 instead of 1.9.1. My policy has been to use the version of Mozilla that underlies the most recent official Firefox ...

Prism 1.0b3pre Available for Testing

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Quite a few bugs have been fixed since Prism 1.0b2, so I've made new builds for Mac and Windows. Please take a look and let me know if you have any problems. Once they've been tested a bit, I'll put them up on the Prism website as 1.0b3. Download Prism Standalone ...

Prism and Extensions

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

One of the most frequent questions I get about Prism is how to make it work with such-and-such beloved Firefox extension. One thing is certain, to make an extension work with Prism you have to add Prism's application ID to the extension's install.rdf file, as described here. The ID for ...

Debug version of Prism 1.0b2 for Ubuntu

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

A number of people have reported crashes when using the Prism 1.0b2 build on Ubuntu. I haven't been able to reproduce this problem, so I've created a debug build for further testing. The first person to get me a usable backtrace of the crash will win: a new car! Okay, maybe ...

Prism Presentation from EU MozCamp 2009

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

This year's European MozCamp was held in my home town of Prague. The venue, the Andel's hotel in Smichov, was perfect: cool-looking interior, convenient location and even surprisingly good food (we are in Prague, after all). Many thanks to the organizers, William and Irina, for choosing Prague and for throwing ...