Whilst working hard I stumbled across a site which mentioned yet another Mozilla project.

Prism (formerly Webrunner) is desktop based browser that doesn’t have all the baggage that a normal browser has, such as plugins and extensions. So much so that it is becoming known as a “distraction free browser”. It allows you to run one web application per one instance of Prism.

It works by creating shortcuts to Prism passing in parameters which you set in the shortcut creation panel, parameters such as application URL and various window settings. Then simply clicking on the shortcut opens up Prism and takes you directly to the application.

This means you could end up with shortcuts to your favourite sites and applications within your programs menu. Good eh?… I think.

At the moment, each window is the same. Which makes this a simple, cut down browser. Which you’d expect as it sits on top of Firefox anyway. I just can’t see why you would want this? It is being regarded as an application that sits alongside Adobe AIR and Silverlight (kind of..) yet it all it appears to do is load the web application as it does in a browser (admittedly, a hell of a lot quicker).

What would be great is if it could manage the toolbar by creating buttons based on the bundle. For example, the Gmail bundle would create buttons such as “Check for new mail” or “Compose”. Or a Facebook bundle for the many Facebook actions.

At the moment, I can’t see why anyone would want to use Prism over a normal browser. Development is still in its early stages so hopefully future releases will shed more light on the direction Mozilla are planning to take it.

More information:

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