Comments on: Mozilla Prism – A Revolution in Web Apps

By: 1-click Web Apps with IE9 | Official Blog for Above the Fold

1-click Web Apps with IE9 | Official Blog for Above the Fold — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:47:34 +0000

[...] in a relatively short timeframe. (Has anyone even heard of Mozilla Prism? It’s been around for several years [...]

By: Josh09

Josh09 — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:29:52 +0000

guess I’ll have to look into mozilla I never heard of it before

By: nitinpai

nitinpai — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:02:38 +0000

@andrew – I am not talking about Prism from the user’s perspective. I am seeing a potential in this idea from the web application perspective. How much easier it would be for a web developer to just say that he need some forms for the app and configure them in an xml. When the user access the app the xml file would tell Prism to render a form. In this case the rendering layout would be decided by the user according to his convenience. That would make the app to just contain the logic and not rendering stuff like CSS Javascript. Wouldn’t that be great!

By: andrew

andrew — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:20:20 +0000

whoops…sorry for the redundancy at the beginning of my post… hehe! got distracted when i went to look between FF and prism running in the task manager…

By: andrew

andrew — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:19:16 +0000

@nitinpai

ok…i can see your point. but none of the “apps” available now take advantage of that.

however, as it is, there don’t seem to be any of these ‘webapps’ that are taking advantage of that. for example, when i went to the prism wiki, i noticed that they have a list of ‘webapps’…like Gmail. so i click on that, i set it up in prism, and then it opens up Gmail in what is essentially a chromeless browser window. that’s great and all, especially since i use Gmail so much. it’s nice to just have a desktop shortcut to it and it goes. other than opening that single thing, though, i don’t see how it’s any more or less efficient than opening up a browser and then going there by way of a bookmark.

i thought, ‘well maybe if i open it in prism, it’ll take up less system resources than the good ol’ firefox resource hog’, but i was wrong. it takes up about 28 megs of memory…about the same as if i were to open it up in firefox.

maybe i’m missing something. i don’t disagree with in that it certainly has potential…but i think ajax applications hit on the revolutionary idea that you are eluding to.

By: LinuxOne

LinuxOne — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:11:56 +0000

HTA is Hypertext Application

Windows has several apps like this built-in.
Find ur PC for *.hta and i’m pretty much sure at least one will pop up.

By: nitinpai

nitinpai — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:52:54 +0000

What is a .hta file?

By: Huh?

Huh? — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:04:58 +0000

Is there a huge difference between a .webapp in Prism and a .hta in IE?

By: nitinpai

nitinpai — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 04:54:48 +0000

@Bob
I might have not put my message properly but I am just stating that WebRunner might be revolutionary in the sense that it empowers a webapp to be coded in a fashion which eliminated the rudimentary process of having the most obvious features namely, security, caching specifics, history management.

If we get a standard where the standards themselves implement these features and we develop the webapp just to implement out business logic. Do you get this?

Lets say take the flash player. Do you see the options like Play, Stop, Zoom in of the player. These options are not created by the flash app developer. They are the part of the player itself. Likewise I am saying if some standard comes in existance just for web apps, then we would be relieved of mundane tasks as for coding for the back button, caching, security which then would be a part of the player (webrunner) itself.

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:24:33 +0000

Okay, so, essentially it’s a chromeless window. I don’t get howthis is “revolutionary” or the “next big thing”. This was an IE4/5/5.5/6 (pre XP-SP2) feature, back then, only IE let the developer strip out the chrome, and mod the window to look and act exactly as we wanted it to. Of course, everyone else hated it.

Windows did things similar to this with ActiveDesktop, which was introduced in what, win98?

Essentially this does what, add to IE’s chromeless window the ability to be launched from a shortcut (this was doable from activedesktop, but was seldom worth the trouble, because there was no analog for it on other platforms).

There has to be more to it than this, otherwise I don’t see how this is supposed to even dream of competing with Adobe’s AiR, or Microsoft’s Silverlight (which leverage the Adobe and .NEt frameworks, respectively) or even Flash, given we’ve had the ability to just double-click on .swf files for years.

Really, this isn’t revolutionary, nor is it new, and it’s hardly a killer app. It’s web development from almost 10 years ago. End users hated it then, they might like it now, but that doesn’t make it new, revolutionary, nor innovative. We had Ajax, back then as well. We just called it DHTML.