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Mozilla Tests Integrated Desktop Browser
HelloDotJPEG writes "Mozilla Labs, the organisation's experimental arm, has launched Prism for interested Windows users to try out. Prism is a piece of software which integrates web applications such as Gmail or Google Reader into the desktop. The program enables you to run multiple such sites as though they were local applications, each in their own dedicated browser window. The product isn't entirely new, but is an officially adopted and rebranded update to the Site-Specific Browser project WebRunner (not to be confused with XULRunner upon which it is built). From the site: '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 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 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"
And thus it was so, that viruses became even more abundant, and 3D accelerated.
which is totally what she said
As always, the innovation over at Mozilla is incredible. After only months of intense development they managed to build an application that's like a browser except it's only a Gecko control in a window. No tabs, no anything. .NET's Browser Control.
I'm sure it would've taken years to build a similar application using
Dunno if i would ever use it. However if you were rolling out Googles web apps in an office enviroment then it might make life easier for the users. More of a desktop paradigm then a bunch of URLs.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Who would actually WANT something like this?
2 of the main reasons to run an application locally is so that you control your own data.....and don't have to look at ads. This looks like the worst of both worlds....right on your desktop.
I think it was almost ten years ago when Microsoft came out with active desktop and Netscape countered with something which was really a browser window taking up the whole screen and called a desktop.
I never saw either being used. Is this the same thing?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
But does it support DNS?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let me say goodbye to positive karma: Welcome back, dear Internet Explorer 3 days...
Mozilla head #1> Umm, MS copies our tabs in their so-called browser !
Mozilla head #2> Ok, let's make a version without tabs... and while we're at it, let's remove that pesky Back button - and we'll have a fix for the memory leak too !!!
Carefully crafted sig.
I don't care much about viruses, running Linux and all ... however XSS (cross-site scripting) is more of a concern. And site-specific browsers could be a good way to limit their reach, if they keep one set of cookies each.
Wrong again.
"This is the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft"
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I'm sure it would've taken years to build a similar application using .NET's Browser Control.
.NET browser control and try to put something like this together in VisualStudio. And the result would suck because it's not the same thing. And that highlights a common problem with Windows developers: they don't think things through properly and instead take the obvious path that Microsoft has laid out for them.
.NET developers years to do this, and it still wouldn't work as well.
The site-specific browsers are full Mozilla browsers, they simply have some chrome removed.
But you are absolutely right that a Windows developer would likely take the
So, although it was meant as sarcasm, you are right: it would take a
This is useful for many users: it makes it much easier to migrate from desktop to web applications, and it is intrinsically easier for people to grasp "to get to your mail, click on the Mail icon" than "start the browser, go to your bookmarks, select...".
Also, if this is well executed, it provides a better level of isolation between web applications. Right now, it's pretty tricky trying to read mail for two or three GMail accounts (it would be less tricky if profiles weren't broken...), and if one web site locks up or slows down the browser, other web apps suffer as well. SSB can address those problems.
Am I missing something here?
How is this different to putting a URL shortcut on your desktop and having the browser window appear without an address bar?
Most comments here now remind me of the whole "no wifi, less space than a nomad, lame"-comment about the iPod when it came out. These comments are completely missing the point.
The current problem is that our desktop is built up around the idea of local applications and that is all the current desktops are designed to handle. But nowadays people are using less and less local applications and more and more web applications (whether you like it or not), and all of these run in a separate layer through the web browser. At some point, if we aren't already there, many people will not use a single local application on their computer apart from their web browser.
At that point, the whole distinction between the web browser and the operating system becomes completely irrelevant and we approach stage where windows is just a collection of device drivers (quote Netscape, mid nineties?).
Currently, the operating system does a lot of great stuff for us with regards to the local applications, and it really needs to start doing the same with regards to web applications and the first step is to make web applications first class citizens on the desktop.
Finally, complain all you want about the privacy and security issues with web applications. Well founded as they may be, they will not change the fact that people are flocking to web applications.
Active Desktop was a bit lame and MS seemed to have no real concept of where they were going with it.It was also well before the age of "web applications" as opposed to web sites. Just because there may be similarities with that old concept doesn't make this stupid.
I work in a (biggish) bank and this would fit well with our current portfolio of applications.
For our web based applications, our users are used to working with multiple browser windows opened simultaneously, each for a different part of our system (e.g. separate browser window for our credit cards system, different browser windows for our treasury system, different browser windows for our customer information system etc).
We actually forbid the use of the "back" button, and where possible we disable it (it messes up our data integrity). We also hide the address bar.
Because we also have applications developed as native windows GUI applications, Prism would probably make our web applications blend in with our GUI applications, improving the look and feel of our system.
Definitely something to check out in the future; although I doubt if it will be worth the hassle of deploying it.
Let's look at the facts. Mozilla is a highly profitable organization. You would think that Mozilla could afford to spend at least a little money on hiring Thunderbird developers. Yet in reality Mozilla has done the opposite: they have completely abandoned Thunderbird.
Why? Because of money.
The vast majority of Mozilla's income comes from Google. One of Google's main products is Gmail. Thunderbird competes with Gmail. So it makes sense that Google wants Thunderbird dead. Of course, they're not going to announce their intentions in a press release, but in reality that's exactly what's going on. Announcements like this one only make their plan more obvious than before.
This kind of anti-competitive behavior is exactly why most Slashdot readers hate Microsoft. Why is Google getting a free pass here?
I just tried it. (On gaiaonline.com, if you must know.) Horrid. Why?
Websites are designed to be used in a browser. Removing all the controls and stuff makes them hard to navigate, and the lack of tabs is quite a pain as well. I've seen that it has settings to add the navigation/etc back in, but then... Isn't it back to just being a browser? The biggest problem with this is that sites aren't designed for it.
In fact, I just tried it in GMail (on our domain) as well, and other than the fact that it's in a seperate process from firefox and they shouldn't crash each other, it's crap. If you click any of the links at the top, they open in browser. (I assume this will still be the case if you can 'installed' the 'app' for those as well.) None of the firefox extensions are available. Speed (of course) isn't improved.
And the worst part? Making it happen for a new site means creating a file, zipping it, and launching it separately. I could write a script that will quickly do that for me from a URL, but I shouldn't have to.
Unless I'm extensively working with a site that tends to crash the browser, I doubt I'll get much use out of this.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I like Open Source software and Mozilla as much as the next guy, but doesn't it make sense to have your embedded controls be tightly integrated with the Operating System?
Why would you want your embedded controls to be tightly integrated with your OS? There's no reason for an HTML window to need tight OS integration. It's another web browser that's susceptible to all the issues that the core HTML engine is. It wouldn't necessarily be subject to the full browser's interface bugs, but it's got the same core so it would share those vulns. Ideally, you wouldn't want any integration with the OS.
I'd rather not need to have both IE and Gecko loaded into memory whenever I run Winamp.This acts as a full replacement for the IE control. If you have some apps calling one and some apps calling the other, yes, both will be loaded into memory. However, if all apps call only Gecko, then only Gecko will be loaded into memory. Excluding behind-the-scenes OS-IE integration that causes (parts of) IE to be loaded, of course; the apps themselves will only load one or the other.