Prism on Ubuntu

I downloaded and started playing with Prism.  And it actually worked, which is cool.  There were only two setup steps:

1. Unpack the tarball in /usr/local/prism, or /opt/prism or something.
2. Symlink /usr/lib/firefox/plugins <- /usr/local/prism/plugins so Flash etc. works.
   

Unsurprisingly, there are still some problems.

• The Refractor for Prism extension doesn't work very well.  Likely this is a problem with Refractor and not Prism, but what it does is it creates a shortcut icon on the desktop.  The shortcut runs your system Firefox, i.e. the same executable you are using Refractor for.  It doesn't ask for the location of the prism executable. It writes the webapp config to the wrong place, and it puts the wrong options into the Launcher.  That's kinda useless by itself.
  
• Running /usr/local/prism/prism and then typing in a URL did create a working shortcut, but unlike Refractor, it didn't automatically grab an icon from the website.  You can try, instead, using Refractor to create the launcher, and then editing the command line so it points to /usr/local/prism/prism, get rid of every option except the "-webapp xxx@xxx" arg, and then move the webapp config dir it creates from ~/.webapps to ~/.prism/$profile/webapps.  It's about the same amount of work as downloading the icon yourself.  Either way, the setup of a webapp is a bit of a mess right now.
  
• You get a blank profile, so your fonts, addons, user stylesheets etc. are all missing.  You might be able to fix this by copying a profile from ~/.mozilla/firefox to ~/.prism, and then running prism -ProfileManager, but I didn't experiment.

And one show-stoppingly dumb problem:

• Every prism application runs in the same process.

I created one for Pandora (which worked fine, once I symlinked Flash), and one for Google Reader.  Ran them both.  Pressed Ctrl+Q to quit one of them . . . and the other one shut down at the same time.  I mean, what?  Isn't a big part of the point of prism to isolate your apps from one another?  If one of them crashes, they don't all crash, and that sort of thing?  That's lame, so sorry, I won't be using Prism yet.