A while back (I think as a direct result of hitting my mail quota on web.de) I switched my personal email over to Google Mail. As a direct result of this, I am reading my mail less frequently; sometimes whole days go by without me checking the inbox. Because Google's browser-based interface is so useful, I exclusively use their web page to check for email, and whereas a traditional mail client constantly checks for new email, the web page has me actively log in every time to check.

Now that Google started rolling out IMAP, I could set up Thunderbird (although IMAP is not yet available for my account). Another solution would be to just keep a browser window with GMail open all day, but I am just too paranoid to do that. In addition to Google being then able to link all my searches to my account, you would also expose yourself to some very nasty (and very real) cross-site scripting attacks. A workaround for this is to open a GMail in a dedicated browser, but this is cumbersome. Mozilla just came up with a new approach.

Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

Prism (and its predecessor WebRunner, which I am using now, because there is only a Windows version of Prism yet) lets you set up a site-specific browser, which is basically a trimmed-down version of Firefox (sans all the menus, buttons and toolbars used for web browsing) that runs only a single web application.

Even in this early stage of development, this gives me what I wanted: a GMail window that I can keep open all day without being logged in as far as my main web browser is concerned. External links still open in the normal browser, just as you would expect a dedicated mail application to behave. I can also launch it just like any other desktop application. Should also work with Google Spreadsheets, which I am frequently using too.

The Prism team is now focussing on making it behave even more like a native application. I imagine that you could very soon set up a GMail as the default mail application (so that it responds to mailto: links from other applications), or a Flickr prism that accepts dropping image files from the Finder on its application icon.