I’ve griped about how slow Firefox can get, especially when loaded down with my standard trio of GMail, GCal and RTM, plus a few other tabs. I was struggling with this again the other day and happened to come across this post referring to the Mozilla Prism project, which allows you to run individual web apps (like GMail, GCal and RTM) in a separate instance of Firefox, without all the browser “chrome” of menus and toolbars. Giving the app its own window restores these web apps (that have taken the place of traditional desktop apps) to primacy in the desktop UI navigation - you can use windows Alt-Tab application switching instead of mucking around with Firefox tabs. And as a massive side benefit, each Prism webapp is a separate instance of Firefox, which means that GMail runs 5x faster itself, and doesn’t slow down all my other browser sessions. There are a couple of issues (the GMail compose field stops working once in a while, the right-mouse menus are missing, links don’t open in ‘main’ browser session), but I love the idea, and it’s working well for me.

Followup after today’s MacWorld keynote: Interestingly (to some, I suppose), this desktop/web app issue is one of my little gripes with my new iPhone: I don’t really feel like I’m using all of what I paid for, since I’m using gMail, gCal and RTM instead of the built-in Mail, Calendar and Tasks (wait a second, is there no built-in tasks application?!?), and those don’t appear on the iPhone desktop, nor are they integrated with each other or the iPhone OS. Today’s iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update does for the iPhone more or less exactly what Prism does for Windows, letting you create desktop icons for bookmarked web apps. I still wish I could sync the calendar with gCal and the notes with something (anything!).

I’ve been using FireFox for a few years, but in the last few months I’ve noticed it getting slower and slower. Opening a new tab often takes several seconds, navigating around and loading pages is also slow, and there are often sub-second hangups while typing in textareas and such. After re-visiting CyberNotes: Firefox Extensions cause Memory Leaks and Crashes, I have disabled Google Browser Sync again - that had caused problems in the past.

Of course, saying that “FireFox has still become too slow” is mostly a perception issue. Apps don’t get slower over time; usually it’s that we’re trying to do more with them - and that is exactly the case with FireFox (or whatever browser). Whereas it used to be just that, a browser, now it’s email, word processing, calendar, task list, maps, news, and whatever else - usually all open at once in multiple tabs, plus various add-ons and GreaseMonkey scripts. So on one hand it’s no surprise that the whole thing appears slower - although you’d think 3Gb of RAM would mitigate that to a large degree. Makes me wonder if FireFox can be configured to use more memory…

Firefox rocks. ExtensionsMirror is helpful. Here’s something that appears to be missing:

I usually keep my cookie prefs on “until they expire”, meaning that I accept cookies without prompting. However, I’d like to be able to have Firefox prompt me to accept cookies if the site is in a list that I define. I’ve checked out Cookie Button and the other cooke extensions, but I don’t see that anyone has dealt with this yet. C’mon all you XPI hackers! Btw, I’d prefer a context menu item vs. a button (I hate buttons).