I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was.  However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.

What’s new in Prism 0.9?

The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3.   It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have.  Also us Mac users now get native widgets!  It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs. 😉

The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.

The file size has also been cut cut down a bit too. Prism went from 43 Mb to 30 Mb.  It’s still hefty, but smaller.  Each individual site is only a few hundred KB though so that’s good.

Another notable update is the ability to add custom icons.  By default it’ll grab the site’s favicon, or you can select your own image.  These can look much nicer than the old globes.  Hint: Head over to the Fluid Flickr group to grab some great icons to use with Prism.

There is also a Firefox 3 extension.  This will be handy once Firefox 3 goes live as it’ll give users easy access to creating Prism desktop applications.

You can now run multiple Prism programs at once too. There were conflicts before, but now each application is independent and you can run Google Calendar and Gmail at the same time in two Prism applications.  You can even run one Google account in one Prism application, and a separate one in the next.  This is very handy if you have more than one account for any online service.  I tested it with two Gmail accounts and it worked perfectly!

So what’s missing?

From what I can see, the only thing that bugs me is no keyboard shortcuts.  I’m so use to using a shortcut key for back in Firefox, that I use it all the time in Prism.  When Prism doesn’t go back, I get annoyed.

Overall Prism 0.9 is a great update and if this is any insight into what is to come, I can’t wait for Prism 1.0!