Prism looks very cool. It fills in a gap we have in the GNOME Online Desktop project where we didn’t really have a good way to make web applications prominent in the desktop menus. Originally, we tried packaging things as RPMs, but it didn’t work very well because the web changes extremely quickly, and popular pages are can be highly locale-specific; desktop applications are none of these. Concretely, I don’t want to be the one updating spec files every time a new online office suite appears.

Prism starts this process naturally, from the web browser. Right now it’s basically a way to break things out of tabs sanely. Where I think things will get interesting is for example, elevating privileges somewhat for Prism applications, such as allowing web application authors to use the platform’s notification system.