News Mozilla introduces a new way to work

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/11/01/mozilla_introduces_a_new_way_to_work/1

Mozilla Labs has released software that integrates web applications into the desktop, allowing instance-specific control of particular web functions.

 

Sounds cool. Now why can't Microsoft do this:

 

but.... but... what about my extensions!!!!!!


ok drama over.

I think this is a great tool for Presentations that involve the web, but for general use nothing beats firefox and its extensibility

agreed, though IE7 has come a long way from 6, it isn't there yet

 

I would say that MS has had this for a LONG time (Since IE5.5), in the form of HTAs. That doesn't mean I prefer HTAs over Prism, however. I've been using Prism for a couple of weeks now (It's great for GMail), and have had no problems with it so far.

 

Doesn't seem to work on my Mac :/

 

I've given it a go and I still don't quite understand the point of it all when a regular browser works just fine.
I guess it really isn't aimed at the home user anyway but it doesn't even appear to have tabs so its kinda weird, it just means having loads of instances of the app open surely?

 

Actually, I had the new outlook in my mind when writing that. Microsoft made the clever decision to use the word rendering engine to display html emails. Lazy b******'s

 

Okay, after reading the summary, I'm still not really sure how this is different from disabling tabs and using the F11 mode. Sounds very 2002-ish.

 

There's more info (including screenshots) here: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

But as far as I can make out, all it is is a separate Firefox window with no buttons or menus for each individual website that you happen to use often. How is this different to an IE6 window with menus and toolbars disabled?

 

Running Leopard?

 

:O
Drama!

 

You can just do F11 in Firefox and you get the same thing... or you can simply remove all the bars....I don't get it...
Beside there is no address bar... I don't want to make scripts to make it go on every web site I want...

This is a joke...

 

It's not meant as a web browser. It's meant as an "Application shell" that happens to use web technology.

For instance, I use it to run GMail as a "Desktop" application. You could do the same with Google Docs/Maps.

It's ALSO meant for running, say, corporate intranets, where you don't want/need extra toolbars/plugins/addons/extensions messing around with the security of the data internally (The last thing you want is the Google Toolbar submitting your private intranet links to Google for PageRank analysis).

This would be great for a POS system, say, or a library computer, where "Fullscreening" a browser won't do (Multiple sessions/screens), and also for when you're developing a potentially problematic site (Writing AJAX, with the risk of an infinite loop in there? Run it in prism and you can kill just that app, leaving all the others running just fine).

The "Add/Remove Programs" in every version of Windows from 2000 uses exactly the same thing. It's a HTML Application, run using Microsoft's version of this, MSHTA.

It's a great idea, but really not all that necessary for most people.

 

Isn't this just a shell/box for web apps? if so, it sound great to me, instead of having them all in different tabs of Firefox (why doesn't the Firefox spell check recognise that?!), you can have them in their own window, that instead of having the normal browsing stuff is just a shell that lets them bring their own buttons and stuff. I think it is a major step in bringing web apps more into the mainstream (whether that is a good thing or not is a different question).

 

Yup. WebApps, here we come! (Valid XHTML1.1/CSS)

 

I don't know why you compare this to Silverlight as it has nothing in common with it.

 

This seems pretty handy, but it uses way to much system resource to really justify having another tab open or such. Right now it's at 42,376K with 2 windows open (one a gMail account, one an outlook express email page). Now to use FireFox to open these same 2 windows it uses 36,572K in comparison. I really like the whole concept and idea behind Prism, but honestly it doesn't quite justify it's own use yet... using 6+ mb more ram than a full on web browser?

Here's to hoping it's memory usage is better in the versions to come, it has quite a potential IMO.

 

No joy in Lunix either...

 

Not looked yet, but this sounds ideal for 85% of the stuff we do where I work (intranet systems).

EDIT: After looking, it seems a little pointless - currently, we create web apps then tell the clients to simply open their web browser, point it to an address, login. That opens a new browser window sans nav buttons, sans 'location bar'. Result - a new chromeless window w/o them having to install anything.

 

I can see it being useful for something like Google Docs, which is a webpage trying to be a desktop application. But for web pages that are simply web pages there's not real point to using it. It'd be really useful if they integrated it fully into Firefox, so you could for example save a shortcut to a webpage on your desktop, then click a tag in it that says "open as own app" and voila, you have your own desktop app. But for only that, it seems a bit excessive to be an entire program.