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.'"

Hmm

[somersault (912633)]

"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.

Re:Hmm

[darthflo (1095225)]

I'm no expert in history, but couldn't that be the beginning of a completely new platform that'd allow developers to securely and consentually install real apps and in-browser controls that'd run natively on the user's computer?
That'd be great! And with just a little bit of effort I'm sure it could surpass the feature-richness and security Microsoft's implementation of this process (they call it ActiveX).

XSS more of a concern than virus

[Nicolas MONNET (4727)]

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.

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

Most users don't even have a 'guard' to let down..

Re:Hmm

[somersault (912633)]

I hear for his next trick he tried to get an open source mail client to talk to Exchange via MAPI

Yeah, those movie plots are always so unrealistic

Woohoo!

[darthflo (1095225)]

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.
I'm sure it would've taken years to build a similar application using .NET's Browser Control.

Re:Woohoo!

[ztransform (929641)]

But my question is: will I have to shut down all my prism applications if I want to restart the browser engine? Or will all prism apps run as a separate instance..

Re:Woohoo!

[griffjon (14945)]

This is indeed a great start; I'd also like to see Moz replicate (and take over) the embedded browser controls that many other Windows apps lean on IE's crutch for (Google Earth, Winamp, etc.)

Re:Woohoo!

[gravis777 (123605)]

I hit submit before I was finished with my comment. I hate it when I do that. I hit submit, and then am like, dope, I wish I could edit that.

The prism interface is a bit prettier than active desktop, and after looking at the article, rather than the summery, it looks like what its doing is pretty much creating a hyperlink to the page in your start menu or something. I hate to say it, but I really do not see anything innovative here. Am I missing something?

Re:Woohoo!

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's just a fracking container. By itself, it's not going to do anything much.

If a web developer wanted to create a web-based app specifically to run in WebRunner, they could do that. XUL works just as well in there as HTML does. That would give you a native UI, with more control over the UI appearance, and support for things like menus, or other native XUL widgets.

Remember the offline web application stuff in Firefox 3? That applies here too - web apps will the able to use local data storage, and the browser will be able to keep the entire web app cached. Using that, you only need an internet connection available for the initial setup, which would probably be as simple as clicking a link. The idea is to keep giving better functionality to web applications, and allowing those applications to better integrate with the OS.

These web apps still run in the browser's security sandbox - despite installing them on your machine, you don't need to give them read and write access to the entire filesystem, and they can't contain native code to bypass the sandbox.

So, you click a link to install the app. The required cached files are downloaded, and a shortcut is created in the Windows start menu, or the KDE / Gnome menus, or Mac OS X's Applications directory, or wherever else. From then, it just works like a normal application, including (limited) access to local resources.

Besides, this was done by one guy. It's existed for around 7 months. It's basically a much simpler way to build XulRunner based applications, which requires virtually no Mozilla-specific code, and can work with any web-app. XulRunner can obviously do far more, because it doesn't run in that security sandbox.

Another active desktop?

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

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?

Re:Another active desktop?

[kripkenstein (913150)]

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?

Well, I might be wrong, but this is how I see it.

Flash, Silverlight etc. are attempts to let you write cross-platform apps that are available through the web. This is becoming the hottest area these days. But you need special tools for cross-platform development; the reason these tools are needed, is that web browsers are not exactly compatible with each other. You can't write an AJAX app and have it run perfectly in IE, FF, Opera, Safari, etc. It is tricky.

Now, Mozilla Firefox currently runs the same way on all the major operating systems. So it could be a cross-platform app environment as well, if you think about it: Develop once for Firefox, and all people need to run your software is to use Firefox (which is a free download). But that is the problem - some people prefer IE, Opera, etc. You can't force them to switch web browser.

Therefore, the solution for Mozilla is to separate web apps from the browser. That is, the platform will be Firefox, but people won't even notice it; Firefox will be like Flash. Imagine running IE and clicking on a web app, which then opens in a new window. It could be Flash, AJAX, or Firefox; you wouldn't know.

Active desktop might have been adopted if there was much of a use for it, back then. There wasn't. But meanwhile things have changed, and nowadays web apps are quite useful and it now does makes sense to integrate them into your desktop - so long as you do so in a cross-platform manner. Mozilla already has such a platform - Firefox - which runs on all platforms in the same manner. All they need to do is a little packaging.

Buzz-word compliance

[mi (197448)]

rich internet technologies like HTML

But does it support DNS?..

Look, ma, no tabs

[Ddalex (647089)]

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 !!!

laugh all you like

[m2943 (1140797)]

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.

And the point of this is.....?

[Tim82 (806662)]

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?

Re:And the point of this is.....?

[bjourne (1034822)]

The difference is conceptual. When people start "blogging" many slashdotters also missed it: "Just upload your html using ftp!" Just compare how simple it is to put together an HTML page with a form and how (relatively) difficult it is to do the same thing using even Visual Basic. My prediction is that this is the beginning to something really big.

iPod like comments

[GauteL (29207)]

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.

Re:iPod like comments

[Koiu Lpoi (632570)]

People are flocking to web applications? Where are you getting this? Can I get a source? Or are you just making this up? Or did you "get a feeling" for it from the number of friends you have using gmail? Because, my experiences tell me, beyond email and flash games, people still want their software to be desktop-based and not web-based.

Another point; before we do anything you said we "need" to do, we need to improve bandwidth to the world if we want web apps to work well. Honestly, I wouldn't know why you'd want to do that, seeing as they do the same thing as a non-web app but runs slower. Sure, they're more portable, but so is Java, and we all know how well Java caught on with the public.

Google killing Thunderbird?

[David Jao (2759)]

I saw this point raised on LWN recently, and it seems relevant to bring it up here. Any observer who connects the dots will realize that Mozilla is killing off their Thunderbird email client, intentionally, and is doing so at the behest of Google.

Let's look at the facts. Mozilla is a highly profitable [slashdot.org] 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 [slashdot.org].

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?

Re:Google killing Thunderbird?

[roca (43122)]

Yeah, we're trying so hard to kill Thunderbird we created a new subsidiary company to drive it, hired a top guy to run the company, and gave it $3M to get started. Pretty expensive way to "kill" it...

Re:Wow, people are sick

[MBGMorden (803437)]

Nobody wants to use these. Really, nobody wants to use web based apps. They suck. They're clunky, they're slow, they put your data elsewhere. Some of them have ads. As a user, anything web based is just horrible. There are a few exceptions (some people prefer web mail because of anywhere availability, but a pure-web based app isn't needed for that. I've got a home IMAP server and can access via a web client when away, or via Thunderbird when I'm at home. best of both worlds).

That being said, as IT personnel, web based apps are great. The data is centralized (read: backed up), there are no extra apps to install, maintain, and configure on each desktop. Users can move from system to system (for example, from their main computer to a spare while one is in for maintenance) without any worry. It's a wonderful thing.

Re:

[Aladrin (926209)]

You contradicted yourself a bit, but I think I understand. The techie users don't like web-based apps, but the non-techie users and the techie admins DO like them. And that's the answer.

Personally, even though I'm techie, I'm sick of running servers at my house. I'd much rather let Google run my mail, calendar, etc, and have a webhost for my site. I'm happy to pay a company for VOIP instead of running asterisk, and I don't have to worry about major downtime if my 'server' dies. It costs more, but the t

Re:Wow, people are sick

[pkey (651794)]

Who would actually WANT something like this?

My grandmother, or any of the users I support who are completely baffled by tabbed browsing.

My grandmother has a gmail account. In order for her to use it, I had to turn on POP for the account and set her up with Thunderbird. Then I changed the icon on the Thunderbird shortcut to an envelope and the name of the shortcut to "Mail" so she could find it. The thing is, I've showed her the web interface for gmail, and she actually likes it better than Thunderbird, but opening a browser, typing gmail.com and logging in are too much for her to handle. With this, I can give her that same shortcut on her desktop with the Envelope and the word "Mail" and it'll take her straight to the Gmail web interface, without an address bar, or forward/back/stop buttons to add confusion.

The users here are set up with IRC chatrooms for their teams. We tried moving them to Campfire for a simpler interface and better opportunities for offsite access, but they liked mIRC better. They said it was easier to use than Campfire. When I asked them how Campfire's interface could possibly be more difficult to use than mIRC, they said it wasn't the interface, it was the fact that they had to leave a web browser or tab open all the time, and then they couldn't find it on the taskbar when they wanted to check out the chat. With Prism, I could give them a shortcut on the desktop that would open a Prism window to the chatroom, where the window title would be the name of the chatroom and the icon would be unique. Plus, it wouldn't get lumped in with all the other browser windows when the taskbar filled up.

Re:

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

Wrong again.

"This is the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft"