I don’t know about you, but I have quite a few web apps that I can’t live without and want to be able to access constantly. However, keeping a zillion tabs open in my browser window gets old, fast.

Enter Prism. This app, put out by Mozilla Labs, lets you take your favorite web apps and move them over to your desktop and/or start menu. This way, you can access them quickly and easily, without having to keep a bunch of tabs open. This will also make your web browser happier and more stable, and your app will stay up even if it crashes.

I used Prism to make a desktop shortcut for my Remember the Milk account and my web accounting program. You could also use it for web-based email accounts-the cool thing about that is that when you click on an email link in a website, your webmail account will pop up so you can send a message. You also get notification icons to show you when you have new messages.

The idea isn’t exactly new, but Mozilla was one of the first companies to start developing it. The app has been around for a while, although a beta version just came out earlier this with new some new features, which you can read about on Mozilla’s blog. Still, it’s a pretty handy tool.  It’s easy to use, both as a FireFox extension and as a standalone application for non-Firefox users.  All you have to do is the enter the site’s URL, (or click on the extension if you’re using Firefox)  tell Prism where you want the shortcuts and you’re done.

Mozilla has how-to videos available on YouTube, and from the comments it looks like  some people don’t think that being able to turn a website into a desktop app that runs separately from your main browser is useful. I disagree, but that’s because I have a bad habit of having a zillion tabs up at one time. Tabbed browsing is so awesome I’m not even sure how I functioned when all we had was windows, but really, I’ve got too much of a good thing going on, and anything that reduces the number of tabs I have to deal with is going to get high ratings for usefulness from me.

What do you think? Is Prism useful for you?

Our Rating of Prism

Tags: Web Browsing

Categories:web