TechnoPhillia!!

Mozilla Prism 1.0 Beta has been released yesterday. The developers at Mozilla Labs have raised the version of Mozilla Prism to 1.0 beta. The launch was celebrated with a shiny new website. Mozilla Prism can be used to move web applications to the computer desktop. It basically displays a selected web service like any other desktop application. The update to Prism 1.0 beta adds several new features and improvements including new Api functionality, application specific settings, the ability to clear private data on demand and automatic application updates when Prism gets updated, full OS X 10.4 support plus support for SSL exceptions.

Mozilla Prism (via Download Squad) can be downloaded and installed as a portable standalone application or as a Firefox web browser extension. Running the standalone application will open a configuration menu where the user enters the url of the web service that should be run on the computer desktop. Additional settings can be configured including shortcut creation, selection of a icon and the elements that should be displayed in the Prism interface (with our without navigation bar, status messages or navigation keys).

The service will automatically start after the configuration finishes. It can later be launched from the shortcut location that has been defined during configuration.

The interface looks like a minimized version of the Firefox web browser without all toolbars and elements. This is a distraction free way of providing web services on the computer desktop. The main benefit besides being able to launch web applications by clicking on a shortcut is that users can do less harm in comparison to the normal web browser interface where they can change settings or navigate to different pages.

A bookmarklet is available to create Prism applications on the fly. There are also official and user created application available for various web services.

Several options - including proxy support and font selection - are only available if the “show status messages and progress” option is enabled during setup.

Autoruns is probably the most popular and advanced Windows startup manager. It is a portable lightweight application that can be used to configure practically anything that deals with files that are loaded during the Windows system start. It goes beyond a simple application that lists programs in some of the possible locations that can contain startup items including information about Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Scheduled Task or Print Monitors among others. The program divides the information into 17 different tabs that display the location the entry was found and a checkbox to enable or disable it.

Removing entries from the list of programs that get started during system start will prevent them to be loaded after the next reboot. Inexperienced users should be very cautious on the other hand as the program displays important files that are needed to run the operating system properly.

The update to Autoruns 9.5 added a new tab to the startup manager. Autoruns now displays multimedia codecs “which are gaining popularity as an extension mechanism used by malware gains automatic execution.”

A click on the Codecs tab in Autoruns displays now system codecs as well. It is probably a good idea to hide Microsoft and Windows codecs from the list to make it more accessible.

Autoruns can be downloaded from the Windows Sysinternals homepage. It is compatible with client and server operating systems starting with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.