More Momentum for the Web/Desktop Hybrid
October 26th, 2007 by Ryan StewartMozilla announced Prism on their labs site today, a re-branded version of WebRunner that helps take your browser applications to the desktop. It has some important differences from Adobe AIR but there are also a lot of interesting similarities that prove people are interested in bringing the web to the desktop.
The differences mostly lie in the way the two runtimes come at the same problem. Prism is basically taking existing web applications and giving them a desktop feel with things like their own window, a place on the system tray/start menu, and a pretty easy way to turn any web site into a desktop application. AIR on the other hand is more desktop centric. In addition to all the branding aspects of having an app on the desktop you also get some important functionality such as access to the file system, the ability to associate files with your AIR application and a standard install/uninstall process.
What’s cool is that both Adobe AIR and Prism will let you take your existing application and port it to the desktop with little or no code changes. They also both use HTML and JavaScript. Prism obviously uses Firefox’s HTML rendering engine, while Adobe AIR uses WebKit. So with both runtimes you can take any Ajax application out there today and turn it into a desktop application. Depending on the feature set and experience you’re looking for you can choose what delivery mechanism is best for you.
To me the big difference is that Prism is open source and AIR is not (even though it uses WebKit and SQLite..) Another difference is that AIR includes the Flash Player, Prism will rely on an existing Flash Player installed on the user’s system.
You mention that “In addition to all the branding aspects of having an app on the desktop … and a standard install/uninstall process”. This is not true. The installer is Adobe branded and certainly not standard because it has Adobe written all over it. Only the uninstaller is standard. This is a mistake that Macromedia made in the Central days and it looks like history is going to be repeated. I hope you can prove me wrong (before the 1.0 release)?
Comparing Prism and AIR is very annoying. AIR allows offline operations and file system access. Prism is nothing more than packaging a browser with the chrome turned off.
Come on guys, dig a little deeper here.
I’ll be quite happy if Prism starts offering some actual features, but until then it’s just fluff.