Great news for this Friday night nerd porn installment.  Mozilla Prism is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I see prism as Firefox without toolbars, or some toolbars if you prefer. With this, Google will surely take over the world. I find it amazingly fast.

To get your favorite web applications as desktop icons, it’s doesn’t really take a whole lot of effort.

Downloading and Unpacking Prism

  1. Download the Prism for Linux tarball to your system somewhere. For this example, we’ll make it the Desktop since this is the default Firefox download location.
  2. Right click on the .tar.gz file and extract here
  3. Double click the prism folder
  4. Double click ‘prism’

That’s about it. If you want a link to prism elsewhere to launch it, right click, create link and copy that link somewhere else. This is really not a proper .desktop file, but it works for quick and dirty.

Create Links to your Favorite Web Apps

  1. Upon launching prism, we’re presented with this:
    Prism 0.8
  2. For this example, let’s create a link to Google Reader. Type the values in the corresponding fields.
    URL: http://reader.google.com
    Name: Google Reader
    I also check the box to add a desktop shortcut. We can move this later if you wish.
  3. After this, Google reader opens in its own designated browser window with no extraneous things.
    Google Reader via Prism 0.8

After you add a whole bunch more, you end up with better than a “Google Desktop” in that you end up with a “Use-whatever-web-apps-you-want Desktop”

Puttin em all together