OStatic

I'll start out by confessing that I personally despise web-apps: they make me claustrophobic, with everything shoved into one page desperately trying to stay above the fold. Prism can't do a lot about that, besides allowing an inch or two of extra space by taking out all the various -bars, and that's not really something that makes me a fan. What I do like about Prism is stability. Web-apps are all fine and dandy, and a lot of people use them for their business needs, but I just can't bring myself to put all my eggs in one basket. Think about it: You're trucking along in Firefox, with Gmail, gCal, Remember the Milk, Google Reader, Twitter, maybe Google Voice, even Chatzilla if you still IRC, all up in your browser. You've also got several tabs, maybe even several dozen depending on what you do, open for whatever you're working on at the moment: research, articles you've opened from Google Reader because the feeds only show a teaser, a link to I Can Haz Cheezburger a friend just tweeted...whatever. All this is up in one or more Firefox windows running a dozen, maybe three dozen extensions and who knows what else. You've also got your CRM/ERP/E-Commerce software - which is of course web-based because they all are now, whether you host it from a server in a colo or a spare desktop in your garage - open, with a couple tabs dedicated to that, because you can't add this contact until you've created an account for the company and yadda, yadda, yadda. You're working on that, and flip over to Gmail to write a quick email to the client asking for some bit of information you need for the CRM/ERP/etc. While you're writing the email, a customer calls, and you flip back over to the CRM/ERP/etc. to put in a quick order/invoice, or check about a question, or whatever, and just as you're saying "And the total on that is..." poor Firefox has a digital aneurysm, leaving you staring at the "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" penguins on your desktop background. And that's just what you do. You're on the phone - provided the call didn't come through Google Voice and take a dive with Firefox - blabbering to the client that your browser just crashed and can they give you a minute, and if you're supposed to be a tech guy like I am, you're losing credibility and future business by the second. You've also lost the email you were writing, you lost your schedule so you can't even handle when the person says "Oh, just call me back when you get the info - by the way, can I get an hour with you next week?" Now you're incompetent twice over because you can't even schedule an appointment by yourself, much less actually handle an invoice question. You've also lost Twitter, because by the time you get back up, call the client back, and clean up the mess, your 2,000 contacts will have said so much that the tweets you hadn't gotten to read yet will have disappeared off the end of the archives. What's really sad is that one of your I-kinda-know-them contacts just tweeted to ask if you had time to take on a big project for their church's ladies group, but you never saw it, and they feel ignored and think you have issues with churchladies. You also lost your IRC session, which, of course, contained the one time somebody actually said something you really needed to see rather than being a long stream of sex jokes and whinging about progress moving forward. That doesn't even touch on the fact that the company account you were creating and the contact you were entering are gone, because they weren't saved yet - you were waiting to hear back about the extra information, remember? - and because it's that kind of day, the invoice you were looking at was corrupted in the crash, and now it looks like your client who owes you for curing the common cold has a credit balance roughly equal to the national debt. The cherry on the Sundae of Doom is that the research you had open - and even sadder, the LOLcat you were LOL-ing at - disappeared into the Mozilianas Trench with everything else, and in the panic, you've forgotten where it all came from. All in all, a wonderful showing of reliability and usefulness for web-apps. Am I exaggerating? Of course I am - I'm not just a pretty tech guy face, I'm a writer too, and Lisa is too good of a friend to be let off with anything but my best hysterical exaggeration. The point - and aren't you glad there is one? - is that while web-apps are nice, and convenient, and even Grandma (sorry Grandma, but it's true) can use them, they are the proverbial basket with all your eggs in them. When they go down - and we all know Firefox goes down more than an elevator - they're going to take everything with them. You might not lose any data at all - maybe you have plugins and patches and a theme blessed by the Dali Lama, the Pope, *and* the Archbishop of Canterbury that protects you against such things - but you might just lose every bit of it, and regardless, it's going to be frustrating and potentially embarrassing. I use standalone apps - Thunderbird, Akregator, TweetDeck, X-Chat, etc. - for most of my needs, because when one of them crashes - and they do, from time to time - that's all that crashes. I don't lose anything else I'm doing, and while I might have momentary thoughts about painful places to send the respective developers, it comes right back up and I go on. For the apps I don't have standalone options for, I use Prism, because it puts my eggs in separate baskets, and keeps them off my face. I doubt I'm the only one who has a UPS to keep their system from crashing in a power failure, and I doubt I'm the only one who uses Linux because crashes are a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence, not every afternoon's entertainment for the rest of the office. I don't see protecting myself from a catastrophic Firefox crash as being any different than using a stable operating system or having a UPS under my desk. I started out with an admission, and I'll end with one: I don't trust Prism *or* Firefox with my CRM/ERP software - I use Opera exclusively for that, just so it's isolated from everything else. It's the golden egg I keep under the goose, and I'm glad it's there, but for the eggs I want separate but don't quite need goosesitting, I use Prism, and I feel secure in it. I don't see Prism as a convenient option, I see it as a stability essential.