Prism has not been on firefox for years bye

dda

Firefox is my primary browser so when Prism first appeared in beta a couple years ago, I was pretty excited by the possibilities; I had fun testing it out, but at the time, though, I had still had a PPC in my network so had to table Prism in favor of Fluid, which, too, is excellent app of the webkit/Safari variety.

I just re-visited Prism recently and, although customizations are not as easily/readily configured as with Fluid, it's still an excellent alternative, albeit Intel only.

What brought me back to it was my need to print out Avery labels - I don't have MS Word or any other of the commercial apps Avery puts out templates for and the .doc templates are some what cumbersome to use in OOo. OOo's built-in templates - at least for a few of the label types I've tried - have not printed out positioned correctly. Whether this is operator error (mine) or something else, I am not sure.

Avery has a pretty good web-based system to create perfect labels but every time you want to use it asks for a log in or your email address...

But if you set up Prism with this URL:

http://enu.print.avery.com/SelectSku

you can bypass all that nonsense and get straight to making to your labels.

The screen at that URL asks the user to enter/select the SKU number for the product you wish to use a template for and you're off to the races.

It's great to be able to get to what you need right away with just a double click of the mouse!

You create your labels - there's options for mail merge, inserting/resizing images, and of course your own personalized text (although fonts are limited to what Avery offers in the interface) - and it prints out to a PDF.

So far it's printed perfectly aligned, great looking labels every time.

(The technology Avery uses for this is Flash so if you are Flash-averse, there's the heads up.)

This is a giant mistake. Running ANY software from the web is a mistake. It can do ANYTHING it wants with your information, and you would never know it. Now I am like most people -- I can't stand Microsoft. But when I am writing a letter on Word, I am very confident that the app isn't transmitting any of my own personal information back to Microsoft because I use an application called Little Snitch to alert me of ANY calls OUT of my computer. But if you are using a WEB-APPLICATION to write that letter, how do you know that any of the constant back-and-forth communication between your computer and the web-app's corporation doesn't include your personal information, like for instance your 1Password database, or you Passwords file, or your web browsing history, or whatever?

Go ahead and download the most recent version of Google Earth, then download Little Snitch. Just for one day, count how many times Google Earth calls home -- that is, calls out out over the web back to the home company to do GOD KNOWS WHAT (plus the HUNDREDS of other companies' that now call out to Google Analytics to keep track of their apps' updates). Also, keep track of HOW LONG each one of those calls home lasts. It is SCARY. GOOGLE EARTH ALONE CALLS HOME TWELVE TIMES EVERY DAY, and each call last around 22 seconds! Do you know how much information an application can transmit over a broadband connection in 22 seconds, especially if it had all day to look for whatever it is looking for and organize that info into a packet for rapid transmission during a 22-second broadband connection? What computer software could possibly have a need to call home 12 times a day, and what the hell are those apps telling the home company?

And now Mozilla Prism wants to create an independent platform for an unknown number of companies to create applications to do things like word processing, spreadsheet creating and management, and whatever else? That means that without a web browser as the underlying system, THERE WOULD BE NO SYSTEM MONITORING CALLS OVER THE INTERNET FROM YOUR COMPUTER BACK TO THE CORPORATION THAT CREATED THAT APP! Is that what you want -- LESS MONITORING OF CALLS HOME?