Mozilla WebRuner becomes Prism, brings web apps to the desktop

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Mozilla, Beta

Mozilla WebRuner becomes Prism, brings web apps to the desktop

by Brad Linder Oct 26th 2007

Oh experimental applications, they grow up so quickly. It seems like just last week we were telling you about Mozilla WebRunner, a stripped down version of Firefox with no tabs or URL bar. And now WebRunner's all grown up and has a new name: Prism.

OK, all grown up might be an overstatement. But Mozilla has outlined their goals for the simple web browser: to let you access web applications without firing up Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or whatever it is you're using to read this site.

Here's how it works. You download and install Prism. The first time you run it, a window will pop up asking you for a URL, name, and where you'd like to "install" the application. Installation basically means creating a shortcut on your desktop, Start Menu, or Quick Launch Bar. To "uninstall" a web app, just delete the shortcut.

While you could argue Prism is just a glorified way of making desktop shortcuts to web pages, something we've been able to do for years, it's a bit more than that. Because Prism doesn't feature all the bells, whistles, toolbars, and add-ons of Firefox, it's a very light weight browser. And if you just want to access Google Reader, Gmail, or Zoho, that might be enough.

Eventually, Mozilla may integrate Prism with Firefox. In other words, there would be a toolbar menu that says "make this a desktop app." Any time you visit a website that you want to open with Prism in the future, you could click a button to activate the Prism settings menu.

Tags: Mozilla-Prism, Prism, web-applications, web-apps, web-browser, WebRunner

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dustin said 9:27AM on 10-26-2007

I've been using webrunner for google reader on my mac and it works great. The only thing that is kinda annoying is that on Windows, the icon is the favicon of the webapp where as that feature isnt available on the mac yet. Also It doesnt seem to like having more than one webapp open at once.

Looking at feature requests you see one of them was to make a firefox extension to make the app shortcuts

Looks like I will have to go download an updated version.

christen said 10:50AM on 10-26-2007

firefox is without a doubt the superior browser..

http://www.xtremegadgets.net

kingkool68 said 12:04PM on 10-26-2007

Yes! This will be great! Something like this would work very well with Pandora.com, oh wait there is OpenPandora which gives you keyboard shortcuts and Last.fm support.

michael said 5:00PM on 10-26-2007

There's already something that exists for that:

http://gallery.live.com/

Pappatom said 5:22PM on 11-12-2007

I started playing with Prism today, and I don't know that I would call it "light weight." Just running Google Reader it takes up 25 megs of memory on my laptop...as much as Outlook!

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