Mozilla Project Releases: Prism

The Mozilla Project (or more correctly Mozilla Labs) have released Prism which is a rewrite of the WebRunner project as Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg puts it:

Identity

“People who follow planet.mozilla.org will likely recognize this project by the former name “Webrunner,” which was a reference to XULRunner, which was a reference to XUL, which was a reference to Ghostbusters. So why change the name? As much as I love geeky references, (especially recursively geeky references), we have to remember that most people aren’t going to semantically disambiguate terms the same way we do. For mainstream users, “running” means faster than jogging, and similarly “execution” involves killing people. The name Prism references a real world metaphor for splitting something apart.”

via: http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/10/24/prism/

The WebRunner/Prism project goal is create a desktop runtime environment that will let web applications – Gmail, Yahoo! etc…. – run on the desktop much like the Adobe MPL platform Flex. It’s not a proprietary platform to replace the desktop browser ala Silverlight and AIR. As I believe this demonstrates:

the web being refracted into individual apps
Prism version 0.8 includes:

Prism 0.8 also has some neat new features. We have been trying to
collect the bugs and feature requests out of the feedback and blog
posts. Here are some things that have been added or fixed for the this
release:

  • CSS themes – Bundles now support common (all
    platforms) and OS specific CSS theme overrides. You can make web
    applications take on different CSS styles
  • Spell check support – Red squiggles and suggestions on the context menu.
  • Better external link handling – Spreadsheets from Google Docs were opening in the default browser.
  • Tooltips support – We now display tooltips for elements with “title” attributes.
  • Copying hyperlinks – Context menu supports copying a link location, if you right click on a link.
  • More “Install Shortcut” options – Quick Launch Bar and Start Menu were added on Windows and Application folder was added on Mac.
  • “Install Web Application” – similar to the “Install Shortcut” dialog, but this will create a web application *without*
    needing a webapp bundle. Launching Prism without any parameters, or
    from the Start Menu or Finder, to activate the dialog. (Alex’s post has more details).

Graphic credit: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

Prism 0.8 features list via Mark Finkle:

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2007/10/webrunner-becomes-prism-a-mozilla-labs-project/

Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Prism

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 16:15 and is filed under All, Mozilla, Mozilla Foundation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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