Mozilla Prism
October 26, 2007 1 Comment
It looks like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are going to get some competition from Mozilla. From the announcement:
Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments 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. 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, which we’ve 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.
At least for now, this doesn’t look quite as robust as Adobe AIR (and I’ve not looked at Silverlight too closely) but it does seem like a natural progression for Firefox. You have to wonder how many of these environments developers are going to embrace. I’d guess there will be a small number of players that remain standing after a shakeout. AIR and Prism both plan to support Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
–jeremy
Jeremy's Blog 
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