Mozilla Prism – Bringing Web Apps to the Desktop

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months.  I’ve only just heard about Mozilla’s Prism – and it’s already changing the way I use web-apps.

Prism, (previously called WebRunner), is essentially a Site Specific Browser (SSB) – meaning that it’s a desktop application designed to host a single web-application.  This is good for many reasons, foremost it causes less distractions.

So far, I have prisms set-up for most of the Google apps that I regularly use: Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.   Now each of these web-applications are not open as separate tabs in my Firefox, but as individual desktop applications.  (Now I don’t have to worry about finding my Gmail tab in Firefox, nor about browser-crashes.)

It reminds of Microsoft attempted to do with HTA – but it seemed more difficult to interface them with external web-applications.

You can read more about Mozilla Prism on their Lab’s blog. [http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/]