aaron c beals

starting off, as so many web 2.0 addicts do, with Gmail, i slowly started to gather more and more web-based-applications, and now i have a core group that i use regularly:

1. Gmail (personal)
2. Gmail (work)
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Docs
5. Google Groups
6. Facebook
7. LinkedIn
8. Google Reader
9. Remember The Milk
10. Joes Goals

for a long time, i used Firefox’s tabbed interface to manage multiple applications at once. on the plus side, all of my webapps were in one convenient location. unfortunately, this also meant that one application could dominate/crash the browser (i’m looking at you, google docs). i also like to alt-tab through my list of applications. the one flaw that really sent me searching for a solution was how difficult it was to log into two Gmail accounts at one time. the ietab plugin worked well while i was in Windows (ietab uses a separate set of cookies), but i’m running Kubuntu full-time at work, so that option became less practical.

eventually, i found an under-hyped offering by Mozilla Labs: Prism. web 2.0 applications have removed the need for many of the typical “web” features — link bars, navigation buttons, etc — and have started to look more and more like desktop applications. the goal of Prism is to start bridging that gap, and to achieve that goal they have provided a “browserless” browser interface in which you can run your webapps. it’s ultra-fast, clean, and each Prism instance provides its own cookies/cache/etc. the only vestige of a web browser that remains is the status bar at the bottom, but that’s just a good idea, as you’d like to see where you’re heading when you click on that link.

pretty much everything you need to know to get going with Prism is in their wiki (and there’s not much to know). give it a try and let me know what you think.