Just a few days ago, a new Mozilla project came to my attention, Prism. Prism is an application that lets you take web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. You may wonder what is the point of running websites, or web applications if you rather, out of the web browser.  When using it, I mainly concentrated on the Google Suite of web applications, iGoogle, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google reader. These ran exactly the same as they normally would in a browser environment.

My first impressions of this were that it is simple to set up and works just as I would have expected it. I eventually questioned the need for having this. I eventually worked out why this is something for me. When using the browser, I always have at least ten to fifteen tabs open at a time, right from when I start the browser, right to the moment I close the browser. My default tabs are always there displaying websites I commonly use. If I am connected to the internet, this application does seem somewhat useless but if you needed to say, view your email and/or calendar without opening a browser and loading a dozen or so tabs, it is much more efficient to just open up the desktop app.

Another thing that this will be aiming for is offline web applications. Using the same conditions as before, instead of opening your browser and having all you tabs come up with the “page not displayed” error or having to even have all your tabs open in your browser, it is easier to access offline capable apps using Prism. I feel that the two main reasons they are developing something like that it to combine those two aspects, having the web application in its own environment out of the browser and to enrich the offline aspect of future web applications.

I can see future potential in this application and can see it being greatly linked with Google’s web applications as well as their Gear’s Offline application. All three of these things linked can make functionality of web applications greatly improve and be more accessible and useful when disconnected from the internet. What I personally would like to see is Google embrace this application to create a Google Web Suite application using Prism with tabs with access, online and offline, to all its web applications in its own environment out of the clutter of the browser and other websites. I can’t wait to see Prism blossom into something great and very useful.

For the past week, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9, codename Minefield. I generally wait till the Beta to try the upcoming version of Firefox but due to the fact I was using a temporary computer with no bookmarks or extensions to break, I decided to give it a good test run. I am extremely happy with a lot of the small changes that I came across in the alpha.

The first apparent change is with the way it handles saving password details. It is so much better than currently in Firefox 2. When you log into a website, there is no more pop-up asking you if you want to save the password for this site. Now it comes up with a small, non intrusive alert message underneath the tab bar. It is better in the fact that you it does not require you to choose an option before you can continue logging on and allows you to select an option after you have logged on to the site. This is great if you are not sure what the password is and lets you make sure you have the password correct before you let Firefox save it.

They have also redone the bookmarks system. This is still in early development and was only added to the alpha about a week or two ago. I haven’t had a good play with it considering I started fresh with no bookmarks. I think that this is going to be way better than the current system, much faster too and display more information. Probably the major thing Places is adding to the bookmarking system is tags. The allows you to easily categorize bookmarks and find/access them. One thing I don’t understand is the reason to star webpages. When you star something it doesn’t bookmark it so I don’t really see the point of it. I am sure there is a reason for it, I just haven’t been told it. I can’t wait to see Places evolve through the alpha and betas of Firefox 3.

The address bar does a little more than it does in 2.0. Now when you type in a query in the address bar, it also shows the titles of webpages and searches them for the query as well as parts of sites. For example if you typed in yum9me in the query bar, it will show the sites in your history that have yum9me in the web address and the title of the webpage. This makes it easier go to pages you already have been too but there is also a disadvantage. Lets say you were going back to a site you visited about about pork and you type “por” in the address bar, included with the site about pork will be any site you have been to with porn in the title and in the URL. That is the disadvantage of the improved address bar but lucky this wouldn’t be a problem for me

Finally, one of the things I love the most is quitting the browser. On the even of you quitting, the message that alerts you that you are closing “x” amount of tabs is a lot more useful. Not only does it alert you, it now gives you options. You can either quit the browser, save your session and quit or cancel back you didn’t mean to quit. This is very useful in my opinion because it gives you the option to save the session or not. Sometimes I will want all of these tabs to open again next time I open Firefox and sometimes I might want to start a fresh session next time. Well it now gives you the flexibility to do this easily by deciding when you quit. If you don’t need this, there is always the option to never show this message again. I love how the alpha manages quitting in a much more useful way then before.

Well that is my first impressions of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9. There is more to it than the things I have mentioned, I just can’t remember some of the other features added and a lot of the stuff will be hidden under the hood. I think Firefox 3 is going to be a great product when it gets released sometime next year. I am looking forward to it. The thing I hate the most about having used Alpha 9 was going back to Firefox 3 and missing some of the cool features. It is a bit like how I feel about Vista, there are some small features in Vista that I really miss when going back and using XP. It’s going to be nice to see how Firefox 3 handles the extensions I use as well as how Places works with the 512kb of bookmarks I have in Firefox.