techblog 

Prism is a simple new application from the Mozilla group.  Basically you use Prism to create an application icon for a single web site.  For example, for accessing this blog, I used Prism to create an icon on my desktop that points to the blog URL.   The configuration was without the navigation bar, toolbar or any other ephemera normally found in a browser.  The end result is a single screen with just the web site I want in it.  It looks so much like a desktop application it is uncanny, but underneath Prism is just a lightweight browser instance for a single web site.

Of course a bookmark can get me there pretty quickly as well, but I tend to have at least three Firefox windows open, each with several tabs and it takes a few moments of thought to remember where a particular tab is.  With Prism, for the sites I visit regularly, I have them as icons on my OSX dock.  Yes, there are versions for Linux and Windows as well.

The only problem I’ve found so far is that it does not accept self-signed X.509 certs, but then it is still in beta.  The only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t automatically grab the favicon for the application icon.

There is even a plugin for Firefox 3 betas that allows you to create a Prism app directly from Firefox.  I haven’t tried that yet though.