• Meebo has added some basic Prism support.  Nothing earth-shattering, but this is exactly what we want to see happening, so hopefully it’s the start of a trend.
• Chris Pirillo did a whole manic rant about Prism on CNN video. Thanks, Chris, just note for future reference that our URL (that’s a web address to you and me) is http://prism.mozilla.com (not .org).

Any other interesting Prism sightings? Let us know in the comments!

Mozilla’s caught on to this kind of open-when-needed use, adding built-in support for tray icons (on Windows) or system dock shortcuts (on Macs), along with minimizing the sites to those areas. The other good new things are font control and private data clearing for each window (which was a not-too-small complaint about the previous Prism), and support for notifications and icon updates when you’ve got a new message, chat, or other ping from your web applications (for those sites that support it). I couldn’t quite figure out how to get new mail notifications or icon indicators showing up, but the Prism Features page touts them as present. Anybody want to show us how in the comments?

Like some people’s love lives (if Facebook is to be believed), the answer is: it’s complicated. Adding a tray icon to your application (on Windows) is simple enough. Just set the value of trayicon in the webapp.ini file to true. The application will automatically hide in the tray when you minimize it. Okay, perhaps this wouldn’t pass the “mom test”, but it’s all relative, and making use of many other Prism features is currently less straightforward.

Getting your mail client to display popup notifications when new mails arrive, for example, is more difficult because some knowledge is required of how the web app works. How does Prism know when to display a notification? Either the application has to tell it, or a third-party developer has to use Prism’s customization features to do the same. (If you don’t have at least some notions of and/or interest in software development, you might want to mumble “javascript schmavascript” now and skip to the last paragraph.)

To make the first option possible, Prism defines a new property called platform on the ubiquitous window object found in every web application. Various functions can be called on the window.platform property. (I must admit shamefacedly that the source code browser for Prism is updated only sporadically and is currently a bit out of date, something I hope will be addressed soon.) For example, to display a popup notification you can say:

window.platform.showNotification(

  "My notification",

  "I'm your app and I just wanted to say hi.",

  null

);

Since window.platform is available to web content (as long as the user is running Prism), developers could add statements like this to their apps to make them more Prism friendly. Realistically this is unlikely to happen unless some sort of standardization occurs around this type of API, and browsers that support it become quite popular (both are likely, in my opinion, but not in the short term). In the meantime, a magic file called webapp.js lets you graft code onto an existing web app that adds support for fancy Prism features. (I won’t get into details now since I am planning a tutorial on this topic.)

The bad news is that you need to be a fairly determined and ingenious programmer to get the most out of Prism right now. The good news is that once someone has gone to the trouble of customizing a specific web app, their work can be packaged as a webapp bundle and distributed to other users, much like Firefox extensions. Now that the 1.0 release has given us a robust set of features under the hood, our next task is to foster an ecosystem of webapp bundles for popular web apps, so that end users and not just developers can get the most out of Prism.

Some important notes:

• Existing Prism apps will not work with the latest version. (See, this one is so important I’ve bolded it.) I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but I decided that the advantage of fixing some of the more irksome architectural issues more than outweighs the pain of having to migrate existing apps. If you want to move an app over to the new version, simply back up webapp.ini, the app icon (if it wasn’t generated automatically), webapp.js (if you have one) and any other files you might have created manually. Then delete the app and create it again using the new Prism version. Finally, copy the backed up files back into the new web app directory. Hopefully this will never be necessary again.
• There is a bug on Linux related to the fact that Firefox runs on top of XULRunner on that platform. This prevents the Prism extension from working on Linux (the standalone version works fine), so I’m not posting a Linux XPI for now. Antonio Gomes, with guidance from Mark Finkle, has already written a patch for the problem, which is waiting for check-in approval, so hopefully the issue will be resolved soon.
• The developer documentation is still woefully inadequate. I did give it a quick once-over and fix any blatant lies and inaccuracies, but there could be a lot more information there. Hopefully we’ll find some resources to create great examples and improve the documentation. If you’re interested in volunteering, let me know.
• Speaking of examples, I’ve put a note on the bundle library page on MDC warning that the bundles probably won’t work anymore with the latest Prism version. It should be pretty easy to adapt them, and I’ve filed a bug in case anyone wants to give this a shot.

I’ll post a followup describing the new features since the last update. I use Prism right out of the box for a few of my most important web apps (Gmail, Facebook and SlimTimer), and it’s darn useful just to have the apps running in their own process with their own icons in the OS X dock. But where Prism really comes into its own is when the apps are customized to use all its fancy features. I’m hoping that some developers will overlook the sparse documentation and give this a shot. If you want to add tray icons, tray/dock menus, drag-and-drop support, popup notifications and the like to your favorite web app, let me know. I’ll be happy to provide some guidance.

Prism standalone version 0.9.9 RC for Mac, Windows and Linux

Prism for Firefox 0.9.9 RC for Mac and Windows

I did my best to reassure him of course, providing arguments that support their choice and pointing him to a blog post by a GNOME developer that gives a fair and balanced assessment of the merits and drawbacks of the two platforms. The truth, however, is that the second wave of the browser wars — the platform wars — is now in full swing, and so far WebKit is winning.

WebKit has decisively chalked up a few early battles. Apple choose WebKit as the engine for Safari back in 2002. Mozilla would have been a logical choice, but those were early days, and even Mozilla insiders say they probably weren’t ready to serve as the foundation for another major browser. Google’s decision to use WebKit in its Chrome browser is more telling. The reality is that, although Mozilla now has a stellar platform, they have made it clear that their primary focus is on Firefox. WebKit, on the other hand, is first and foremost a platform, and as such has an inherent appeal to software developers looking to build their own browser or embed browser functionality.

Well, so what if a bunch of products adopt WebKit over Mozilla? (Flock is the latest to plan a switch, if you believe the rumors.) Firefox is a hugely successful brand, with steadily growing market share that recently topped 20%. And competition in the browser market is a good thing, as Mozillians are quick to point out, and will only serve to accelerate innovation to the benefit of end users.

Mozilla has established principles that imply a custodial role for the internet at large. It is becoming increasingly clear that software that provides some browser functionality (but may not be a browser in the traditional sense) is going to play a bigger role in the future of the web. From media browsers like iTunes and Songbird to single-site browsers like Fluid and Prism, people will be accessing the web via a variety of products in the future. If Mozilla fails to compete effectively in the platform space, it will see its market share decline even if Firefox holds steady among traditional browsers.

This means that Mozilla will be less able to pursue its stated mission. It will be handing control to large corporations like Apple and Google.

Mozilla knows this of course, and they’ve done many things recently to respond to the WebKit threat. The Fennec mobile browser is clearly a huge strategic priority, an attempt to counter the current dominance of WebKit in that space. Firefox’s memory consumption, long a sore spot, has been dramatically improved. And a few individuals have made heroic efforts to make Mozilla more appealing as a platform, rationalizing the code base and rearchitecting Firefox so that it runs on top of XULRunner.

I think more is needed. In particular, I would love to see a reversal of Mozilla’s decision not to “invest in a pre-packaged or stand-alone XULRunner at this time.” This is as much about public relations as anything else. They already offer nightly builds of the platform SDK. (Can we have debug mode though, pretty please?) The platform documentation is so improved it brings tears to my eyes. But hardly anyone outside of the Mozilla community knows about these things. A big loud honking public statement that the platform is being actively developed and marketed, as a product, would in itself be a huge help in getting people to choose Mozilla for their software projects.

The other area screaming for improvement is platform evangelism and developer relations. A funny quote in the TechCrunch story about Flock dumping Mozilla (true or not) cites a “source” complaining that they feel like the “red headed stepchild of the Mozilla development community.” This might seem a bit overboard, but the last open forum I witnessed between Mozilla and users of the platform rapidly descended into a heated shouting match that I thought, for a while, might come to blows.

I don’t want to be seen as airing dirty laundry here. There are tensions inside any developer community, and not all of the complaints (expressed loudly by a few individuals) were fair or reasonable. When I was new to the community, I found Mozilla employees to be exceptionally welcoming and helpful. But I still believe there is a lot of room for improvement. It would be fantastic if Mozilla would appoint at least one individual whose specific role it is to act as a liaison with developers using the platform. A clear go-to person who can help developers to get their patches landed (or explain to them in clear, diplomatic terms why they won’t be) would be invaluable. This person could also help to evangelize use of Mozilla as a platform.

I’m not too worried about Mozilla’s technology. WebKit may be the shiny new toy, but on balance Mozilla stacks up well in terms of performance, stability, standards compliance and features. More to the point, a lot of folks smarter than me are aware of the technology’s shortcomings and are continuing to improve it on many fronts. What is missing so far is clear, public recognition of the strategic value of having a competitive platform.

This approach has two particularly appealing aspects. First of all, the articles are formatted for easy reading on a small screen. Images, sidebars and the like are stripped off, leaving the raw text in a nice big font. Secondly, the text is stored on Instapaper’s server and downloaded to your phone when you sync. This means that you don’t need a live net connection to access it, nor do you have to put up with MobileSafari’s slow loading times and inadequate caching behavior. The latter is particularly irksome because I don’t always read an article in its entirety in one sitting. With Instapaper, my reading list is accessible at the click of a button, and when I select an item that I was already reading, it pops up immediately in exactly the spot where I left off.

I did a bit of hacking on a very basic Firefox extension called Instabutton that adds a toolbar button (rather than a bookmarklet) with the “Read Later” functionality described above. So now I have a context menu item in Firefox called “Instapaper” that I can select for any link on a webpage. When the Economist comes out on Friday, I go to their website and load up the table of contents of the new issue. With a click, select, click, select, I cruise through the articles picking the ones that catch my eye. The whole process takes a few minutes. The Economist erudite prose sits alongside various other publications and blogs in my Instapaper reading list, meaning that I have access to a broad range of material whenever I have my iPhone with me. Which is always.

With all the morbid commentary about the imminent death of the publishing industry, my first reaction was to see this as further proof that traditional newspapers and magazines are doomed. The few remaining advantages that print has to offer — convenience and portability — are vanishing with the advent of portable reading devices (something I predicted five years ago). Now that I can get my weekly Economist fix in my pocket for free, why would I waste my money on dead trees?

My second reaction was to see this as a huge business opportunity for publishers and for enterprising software developers looking to attach combine an Instapaper-like app with an iTunes-like payment model. This is particularly easy to imagine in the specific case of Apple and the iPhone. Naturally publishers would have to restrict free access to their content in some way, but assuming they do, wouldn’t readers be willing to pay a fee for the great user experience I now enjoy, in the same way they’ve shelled out billions for songs on iTunes thanks to the full service convenience of Apple’s service?

Not according to Clay Shirky they won’t. In a post entitled “Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers“, he argues that publishers will not be able to save themselves by charging for their content. (And he helpfully links to a number of articles in the mainstream press that outline ideas very similar to my own, if only to debunk them.) Clay’s post did not convince me that the charging for textual content is a non-starter, however. Quite the contrary, the piece struck me as ideal fodder for a merciless fisking.

As background for his argument, Clay first contends that the term “micropayment” is misplaced in describing a putative paid content system, citing an upper limit for payments that are truly micro that I suppose he extracted from somewhere in the nether regions of his anatomy. Well, who cares? Whether we choose to call them micropayments or floozlebeezies has no material impact on the potential merits of such a system.

His second piece of background is that small payments won’t fly because users don’t want them:

The other key piece of background isn’t about small payments themselves, but about the conversation. Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions.

The implication is that paid content can only succeed if it is actively sought by us, the “users”. Perhaps I’m missing something, but in this context I don’t see any difference between paying for content and paying for anything else. Carmakers charge for cars because they need revenues to pay for capital, labor and to provide value to their shareholders. Car buyers aren’t clamoring to pay for vehicles, in fact I’m quite sure that few indeed would say no to a free SUV or Prius. Publishers have costs and shareholders as well, and it is quite natural that they would like to charge for their wares whether their customers want to pay for them or not.

As far as the analogy to successful paid content systems like iTunes is concerned, Clay rejects it by claiming that these systems have thrived only because they rely on “closed systems” that give consumers no other choice than to pay for a particular good (ringtones, online avatars or whatever). Regarding iTunes, he states that:

Apple’s ITMS (iTunes Music Store) is perhaps the most interesting example. People are not paying for music on ITMS because we have decided that fee-per-track is the model we prefer, but because there is no market in which commercial alternatives can be explored. Everything from Napster to online radio has been crippled or killed by fiat; small payments survive in the absence of a market for other legal options.

Potentially convincing if it were true, but the evidence suggest that it isn’t. Rhapsody, for example, is an all-you-can-eat music subscription service that has some passionate adherents. In iTunes I can choose from dozens of free online radio stations offering music. If iTunes has succeeded with a pay-per-download model, this isn’t due to lack of competition. It is because listeners consider the product and user experience to be superior to alternatives.

The meat of Clay’s argument comes in the last few paragraphs:

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

In other words, articles hidden behind a paywall will fail to attract readers because we can’t link to them or share them with our friends. Searchability and linkability are certainly important, and publications that charge for articles currently tend to address this by offering the first few paragraphs of an article for free so that it can be linked to and crawled by search engines. But still, the point is valid. If heaping servings of free content are only a google away, getting people to pay for your content is going to be a daunting challenge.

One thing I don’t like about this line of reasoning is that it implies that all content is basically created equal. Any plan to charge for articles rests on the inherent assumption that that content has a particular appeal that can’t be satisfied elsewhere for free. If that isn’t true, then Clay is absolutely right, and no payment system for textual content will ever make it off the ground. It beggars belief, however, that readers will abandon well-written, well-researched journalism and commentary written by professionals for amateur blog posts rather than pony up cash for the former. The reason print media is now struggling is primarily due to competition from the very same publications’ free websites, not from the amateur blogosphere. Otherwise, why are folks willing to pay for the latest Bruce Springsteen or Madonna album when there is plenty of free amateur music from wannabe rockstars available online?

Successful implementation of a payment system for online articles will be tricky. Proponents will have to get a lot of things right, just as numerous music services came and went until iTunes found the right balance of inobtrusive (and now non-existent) DRM, convenience of purchasing and smooth integration with portable listening devices. It will also require that a critical mass of content comes on board (another point I made a few years back). Publishers will start by dipping their toe into the waters of paid content, but when the proverbial tipping point is reached, and finding quality content for free is no longer trivially easy, they will dive in en masse.

It won’t be easy, and it will take a while to get right. Considering the surprising success of the iPhone as a reading device, coupled with its unique track record of confecting the right user experience and its existing content distribution and payment systems, Apple is a leading contender to be the first to market with a viable offering. Amazon, who is making headway in this market already with the Kindle, is another strong candidate. (Maybe I should mention that I own shares in both these companies, but then I only bought them because I believe them to be so well-situated to take advantage of ongoing shift to paid digital media.)

Rather than being a lost cause, payment for online articles has an air of inevitability. Clay underlines this point himself when he states, quite correctly, that “if small payment systems won’t save existing publishers in their current form, there might not be a way to save existing publishers in their current form.” Can you imagine a world without the well-crafted prose of the Economist or New York Times, without the type of informed journalism that depends on the deployment of trained professionals across the globe? I certainly can’t. And this alone is sufficient reason to believe that, one way or the other, we’ll be paying for much of what we read online at some point in the not so distant future.

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I particularly appreciate this opportunity because it gives me a much-needed nudge to post something on this blog, which has been dormant for far too long. So without further ado, seven gripping facts about me, me, me:

• Although I sound and act American, I’m actually British by birth and nationality. My family moved to Connecticut when I was six years old, where I dropped my English accent and burgeoning cricket skills like a live grenade. I still drink my tea with plenty of milk.
• I’ve lived in Europe since 1992, first in Paris, then in Hamburg and now in Prague, which I appear to be unable to leave. This means I’ve spent most of my life outside of the States (22 versus 16 years).
• One of the main reasons I prefer to live in Europe is my love of learning and speaking foreign languages. I started to learn French at the age of 13 and spent a few summers in France as a teenager. I dreamed of moving to Paris after university, so I did. I used to be able to fool the natives into thinking I was French, but my skills have rusted a bit since then. I also speak German and Czech fluently but I couldn’t fool anyone into thinking much of anything other than how funny my accent sounds. I’ve dabbled in many other languages, in most of which I can only utter a garbled sentence or two: Russian (three years at university and a semester abroad in Moscow), Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Dutch, Japanese, Swedish, Farsi, Hebrew and Esperanto.
• I love playing golf despite my utter lack of natural ability. My official handicap is 23.6 but I swear, I’m really much better than that.
• I have an obsessive personality and when I take up an activity, I practice and talk about it incessantly. For example, I studied backgammon intensively for a couple of years, achieving a near world class level. This didn’t prevent me from losing more money than I would care to admit gambling on matches. My latest passion is piano.
• In college I used to joke with my friends about starting a band called “Plastic Million”, for no particularly good reason. As a result, my moniker on various online fora is “plasticmillion”, which I can’t bring myself to change despite its unquestionable goofiness.
• Everyone in my family cooks well. When I’m too lazy to go shopping (a frequent occurrence), I enjoy making tasty dishes from whatever happens to be lying around in my kitchen. Ask me about my corned beef chili and Indian ratatouille (or, as I call it, “ragatouille”).

I’m supposed to invite seven other people but I’m late to the party, and I can’t think of even one Mozillian with a blog who hasn’t already taken the plunge. I dare say this meme is rapidly running out of meme juice anyway.

I’m very keen to hear from others where they think the product should be heading and what sort of organization would be needed to keep some momentum behind it. I feel strongly that Prism can be of great value to Mozilla, and I’m curious to find out if anyone else out there (besides Mark, of course) agrees with me.

I’m also looking forward to attacks by rabid beers [ed note: I meant bears, of course, an obvious Freudian slip], vehicles plowing willy-nilly into air-conditioning units, epic rockslides and all the other mundane occurrences we’ve come to expect at Mozilla community events.

• Chrome uptake tails off quickly (with more gloomy commentary at Giga Om). I’ve been running cold and hot on Chrome’s market potential, but with the steady hand of hindsight (backed up by statistics) to prop me up, I’ll stick with my original assertion that there simply isn’t much room in the market for a new browser brand. Google should focus on making Chrome an awesome single-site browser. I suspect that, once market realities set in, they may well do this.
• I learned a lot from this interview about HTML 5 with Ian Hickson. Just one thing: 2022? Really? I’m all for setting realistic (i.e. highly pessimistic) deadlines, but let’s strap on a pair and get this puppy out the door. My long and storied experience with missing delivery dates has taught me that setting deadlines too far in the future doesn’t make it more likely that you will hit them. It just reduces urgency and makes everything take even longer.
• Ars Technica has a detailed writeup on Skyfire, a Gecko-based browser for Windows Mobile. I’m not sure that users are going to be that gung ho to install third-party browsers on their devices, but maybe Skyfire’s strategy is to cut OEM deals once they are ready. The server-side rendering idea is certainly intriguing, although it breaks a core adage of the technology sphere: never bet against Moore’s Law.
• Did you know that Google has an open source effort called Chromium that complements its Chrome browser? Oh, you did? Ah well, my fault for having such spectacularly smart, well-informed and discerning readers. Anyway, here is a veritable slew of information about the relationship between Chromium, Chrome and the Google mothership
• I’ve been hearing for many months that Adobe has Flash running on the iPhone in its labs. Well here’s confirmation (that they are, at very least, working on it). Lack of Flash is one of the things I love least about my iPhone, so I dearly hope this happens. What use is a web without Flash video and Scramble?
• Todd Ditchendorf has done a fantastic job on Fluid. Now he’s readying a new OS X browser. The feature list is hot, but the same caveats mentioned for Google Chrome apply here, minus the market-bending might of the web’s most powerful company. And why the heck is this a “social browser”? Is every new piece of software now “social” by default?
• Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian join Mozilla to head an effort creating new tools for web development. The web sorely needs better development tools. Firebug is getting more love, and Ajaxian (them again!) ran a fascinating piece today about JS Bin, a pastebin variant that enables collaborative development of JavaScript code. Methinks I spot a trend.