Here in the TechTarget ANZ editorial bunker, we’ve finally cracked and abandoned Microsoft Outlook. The monolith was churning our disks all day, rarely shut down cleanly and was just not much fun to use.
The alternative that tipped us over the line was Mozilla Prism, a new Firefox add-in that allows the creation of a “site-specific browser,” an innovation that allows Prism users to use a designated website in a dedicated window that lacks any navigation tools.
When you make an “application” using Prism it also creates an entry, complete with icon, on the list of applications visible on the Windows XP taskbar. The site-specific browser is also accessible through Windows’ ALT-TAB shortcut, again with its own icon. Prism even creates a desktop shortcut to launch your “applications.” Usefully, for those frustrated by Firefox’s memory leaks, the add-on also creates a new Firefox.exe for each site given the Prism treatment
We quickly found that Prism made us more likely to use Gmail. A few tweaks of that service’s settings and we were able to embed our Google Calendar in our Inbox, quickly providing an experience that rivals Outlook’s levels of integration. In a little under a week, we’ve become hooked on this way of working.
We’re at a loss to explain why it becomes easier to use web applications in their own window, given that there is little difference between Gmail in Prism and Gmail in a Tab of any other browser. Whatever the reason, we were happy to learn that the newest version of Google’s Chrome browser offers similar features to Prism. The “Control the Current Page” button offers an option to “Create Application Shortcuts” that mimics Prism’s functions.
Mac OS users aren’t spared the charms of site-specific browsers, thanks to Fluid.
We’re yet to take the next step and abandon our reliance on Word and Excel, two applications on which we are utterly reliant. But site-specific browsers have certainly made a web-based desktop environment (and the potentially smaller maintenance burden) seem more feasible than they were before we discovered Prism.
There are, of course, lots of reasons not to go down this path, not the least of which is the complex set of questions raised by having a third party take responsibility for your potentially-contentious email archives.
Yet we have found site-specific browsers so compelling in such a short time that we imagine IT managers and CIOs may find their imaginations experience interesting epiphanies once they sample this technology.