Mozilla Labs

We’re happy to announce the Prism prototype is now available for Mac and Linux! We’re also releasing an updated version for Windows that resolves some of the issues users have encountered.

Download the Prism prototype for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

Prism now provides a cross-platform way to integrate the web platform with the desktop environment, and developers don’t have to lift a finger to desktop-enable their web applications, while users have the choice to use their favorite web apps in their browser, on their desktop of choice, or in both places.

Incidentally, we’re working on a simple way to open a web application in Prism directly from Firefox (no separate Prism download required), and here are some more ideas folks have suggested to us for improving desktop-web integration:

• allowing web applications to register to handle particular content types;
• drag-and-drop support for uploading files to web applications;
• support for running applications offline (local storage, offline/online event notifications, caching of application components, etc.).

We’d like to see these sorts of features standardized as part of the web platform so they become available to Prism, Firefox and other web-enabled applications. The WHATWG is already standardizing content type handling and offline support in its HTML5 spec, and offline support is already available in Prism and development versions of Firefox 3!

We’d love to hear more ideas for improving Prism and desktop-web integration, so keep the feedback coming! Tell us which web apps you’ve been using in Prism and how it changes the way you use those apps. Report problems you’ve encountered or features you’d like to see in future versions. You can even check out the code and contribute changes!