Mozilla Brings Webapps to the Desktop, Challenges AIR, Silverlight | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Brings Webapps to the Desktop, Challenges AIR, Silverlight

webmonkey.com

28 pointstroystribling16 comments

Awesome. Another challenger in a market that doesn't exist.

You can do this on a Mac with

which I believe runs on Safari/Webkit. It allows for Applescript and plugins.

But with +90% of the world still using Windows, this is huge. Especially for people making desktop-style apps on the web. (e.g. 280north)

I suppose I pointed it out because the demo video was done on a Mac.

Webkit is much more lightweight then Firefox and plugins don't really matter in this scenario. I'll stick with Fluid.

One of the things I don't like about prism over AIR is that it doesn't allow you to use free form shapes for your widget. It's basically just another window. That may seem like a silly complaint, but I really enjoy the aesthetics that it allows.

That's one of the reasons I don't use AIR. It's the stuff as 20 years ago, with windows with all forms and sizes, and weird black buttons.

I know it's hard to build cross-platform stuff, and stuff that tries to look native (Java/Swing, Qt) also fails horribly, but stuff like AIR makes me cringe when I can't use command-a, or control-a/e. I think browsers are relatively good in that regard; at least in Safari I can use all my common shortcuts, even if the web page is created on windows/linux. That sounds logical, but is a huge difference with things like Java, QT, Gtk+, AIR or Silverlight.

I would really like to see each Prism instance maintain it's own profile. Right now they share the browser profile so you can't have two Prism windows open with different Gmail accounts for instance.

EDIT: It's on the wishlist, nice! https://wiki.mozilla.org/prism#Wishlist

I used Prism for a bit, but I have dropped it. For apps like Gmail or Google Apps, I've found its easier to use Chrome instead, as the main goal is keeping Firefox's inevitable crashes from interrupting their function.

For Songza and Pandora, for which I was also using Prism, I've found Xenocode's Virtual Apps to be much better:

http://www.xenocode.com/Music/

I use their Pandora app on a daily basis.

Anyone have any ideas on redistribution? Fluid doesn't allow redistribution, but I love how you can create a "MenuExtra" that puts it into the Mac menu bar.

@ellyagg I can understand that not everyone thinks that this technology is a great idea, but for my audience this could be a huge win for me!

Silverlight doesn't have desktop apps as far as I know, so it doesn't compete in this realm.

Silverlight "Out of Browser" (or SLOOB) is in the v3 beta. It has some pretty severe limitations though before it will compete with AIR (can't run chromeless, no tray icon support, subject to crossdomain issues as it runs in a browser sandbox, no webcam/microphone support, and more.

I think they're making a big mistake releasing a competitor for the world's best Twitter application platform by not supporting what would be needed to build a Twitter client with it.

Silverlight 3 will. And Silverlight is basically a subset of WPF, so that makes cross development easier (Same skills and tools to do both Silverlight and WPF apps).

Our local Microsoft evangalist was pushing us to develop a thin client app with Silverlight 18 months ago. It's definitely where they want to go with it.

Sounds interesting. But how does it add much more value than a website shortcut link on your desktop? Also, doesn't Windows XP have a "Links" toolbar option to access favorites from the toolbar?

I wish they'd put more effort into fixing the performance and font rendering issues with Firefox (esp. Mac version) instead. Sigh.

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