Webrunner, 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.

• Prism lets users add their favorite web apps to their desktop environment. When invoked, these applications run in their own window.
• They are accessible with Control-Tab, Command-Tab, and Exposé, just like desktop apps. And users can still access these same applications from any web browser when they are away from their own computers.
• Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
• And while Prism focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience, we’re also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.

Click to view attachment

The Best of Both Worlds(@ mozilla Labs)
"Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

And while Prism focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience, we’re also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.

We’re also thinking about how to better integrate Prism with Firefox, enabling one-click “make this a desktop app” functionality that preserves a user’s preferences, saved passwords, cookies, add-ons, and customizations. Ideally you shouldn’t even have to download Prism, it should just be built into your browser.

We’re working on an extension for Firefox that provides some of this functionality. For more information about the user experience we hope to achieve in Prism."

Prism @ Mozilla Labs

For more information about the user experience in Prism, see Alex Faaborg’s site.

For some of the technical details and new features found in Prism, see Mark Finkle’s site

Prism 0.8 - Now for Mac & Linux

November 3, 2007 at 12:29 am

Over at Mozilla Labs, we’ve released Prism 0.8 for Mac and Linux . We also took the opportunity to release a refreshed Prism 0.8 for Windows too. Why? you may ask. While getting the Mac and Linux versions ready, we received lots of feedback and bug reports from users. We were able to fix a few of the painful bugs, so a refreshed Windows release seemed appropriate. Some of the fixes include:
Bug 401021 - Shortcut with spaces in web application name doesn’t work
Bug 401244 - Blank name field causes silent failure
Bug 391429 - Editor caret is hidden in XULRunner applications

That last bug (391429) was a XULRunner bug, not only Prism. It was the reason that the cursor/caret was not visible when using rich editing in GMail and other rich editing web applications. Thanks to Songbird’s Matt Crocker for fixing that one!

NOTE: For Windows users who want to install the refresh - Uninstall and reinstall, just to be safe. As long as you reinstall into the same folder location, all your shortcuts will continue to work.

As the Labs post shows, we have some nice features in the pipeline. We also want to know what web applications you’re using with Prism (and how we could make those apps better).

Thanks to everyone who is downloading and trying it out. Keep the feedback coming.

Download