varunnangia.com

For those of you, who like me, managed to miss the original announcement of both Mozilla’s Webrunner project and the later Mozilla Prism announcement and later found them while perusing the Mozilla entry on Wikipedia, you may be wondering what on earth either of those things are.

In one sense, these are the logical steps that need to be taken to make the web not just a source of information but an actual “platform” as well. Instead of using one web browser to open and use multiple websites, this project aims to create what are best described as “site-specific” browsers – browsers that allow websites to more easily fit into an actual operating system. One early take on this was the Active Desktop in Internet Explorer 4.0 and later which was a plague on everyone’s computer. While the implementation was flawed and heaven help you if you’re using Internet Explorer, the idea showed promise – and nearly a decade later, we have Mozilla’s first take on this.

Site specific browsers (SSB) have two remarkable effects on the web, one positive, one potentially negative, from what I can see.

First, on the negative side of things, depending on how an SSB is implemented, the web may finally be Balkanized as individual SSBs allow access to only a small set of sites. Thus the entire notion of the web as a bidirectional free-flowing connection of links from website to website, from webpage to webpage, is threatened by these walls. That’s not to say that SSBs, or indeed Prism itself, are designed with that approach in mind – you can freely navigate from website to website, provided your starting website offers appropriate links. However, using an SSB allows website designers far greater control over content than does a browser that allows you to just freely open another window or a tab (for the nitpickers: yes, I know, you always have the option of firing up a proper browser). On the other hand, the very existence of SSBs is an admission that 99% of the web is crap and the 1% of the web that is useful is recognized as such and given a more permanent presence than the formerly transient existence in the history or cache of a web browser, even if they restrict data portability or make it difficult to freely flow from website to another.

On the brighter side of things, however, that SSBs exist indicates the maturing of the web as a platform. A decade ago when Microsoft introduced Active Desktop, it was both scorned for not having much use since the standards that make up the web today weren’t present and derided for poor performance. Modern HTML, coupled with the miracles of CSS (when you can get it to work, of course) and AJAX, is much more readily suited to living in a window alongside your desktop applications. Web applications have also become much more useful and more integrated into the workflow of users. Ten years ago, I would wager that 99% of interactive online websites were either primitive webmail or bulletin board services. While those are still likely to be the overwhelming uses of such interactive websites, today those websites coexist with calendering websites, social networking websites and marketplace websites. Coupled with universal authentication systems like OpenID and data bearers like XML, websites can freely share information with one another. In one sense, then, websites have reached the functionality point where they can be used instead of full-fledged desktop applications. And given that websites are available to any computer with a reasonably modern web browser, unless there are security concerns with sharing the information, the convenience of not having to remember to take documents, or worrying about installing applications, greatly overwhelms any limitations on such websites.

So there you are, Mozilla Prism – an easy way to run one website inside its own window. Utterly pointless, and exceedingly useful, all at once. I suppose the best part of this is for the developers who can now write one “application” and have it used everywhere, much like Java once promised it would be. Go here for details on how to set Prism up, and here are a few icons for your new “desktop applications”.

(Bonus – if you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, there’s an SSB called Fluid that runs WebKit instead of Gecko, if you’re the kind of person that cares about such things. It also features tighter integration with Mac-specific applications, such as the Dock and Growl.)