One of my complaints about web applications is that they all run in the same instance of the browser process. And consequently, they are all at the mercy of the worst behaving tab. I have reported in the past of web pages that keep on using 100% of the CPU and making the browser unresponsive. I have a suspicion that Adobe Flash is to blame for a majority of these situations, but I don't have concrete evidence such as a URL that I can point you to that will trigger the bad behavior. My only recourse is to kill the browser process and loose all my work in progress (blog entries that I'm composing, the web forms that I'm filling out, etc.)
It's really easy to use. Starting the prism executable gives me a dialog box like this:
Clicking on the OK button will create the Desktop Icon or Start Menu item or Quick Launch Bar item as requested. From that point on, I can start the web page by double clicking on the Desktop Icon, just like any other Desktop application. Prism will start the web page in a dedicated process separate from the running Firefox browser, if any, where all of my other tabs are:
Now I can edit my blog entries without fear that some other random links I click will make me lose my work.
Here's some interesting statistics:
The Prism instance that hosts my blog page takes up 20MB of memory on my WinXP Pro SP2 machine.
The User-Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007110108 prism/0.8"
From about a day's worth usage, I already miss several features that I had learned to depend on:
No tabbed-browsing
No password cache
No /searching
I'll keep this experiment going for a little while. I'll let you know if and when I hit a show stopper that would force me to abandon Prism.
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![]("http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/images/prism-create-shortcut.png" "\"Creating")
![]("http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/images/using-prism.png" "\"Running")