Mozilla Labs shines light on Prism
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 26, 2007 at 5:52am
Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments designed to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.
“Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web,” says a note on their web site. “We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.”
The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner—XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface—which has been moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism. Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.
It’s designed to let users add their favorite web apps to their desktop environment. When invoked, the apps run in their own window. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
