Build Desktop Apps with Web Technologies with Mozilla Labs' Chromeless 0.2

The Mozilla Labs team has released the second ever update to a relatively new project - Chromeless. While it's been a few months since we first heard about the ambitious new project, the team has been working on making some big changes after the first release and they've culminated with the release of Chromeless 0.2.

Now that this big update is out of the way, the team plans to release more often and with fewer changes to make it easier for developers to keep up.

"Chromeless is a project to make it possible to build desktop apps with web technologies, and today Chromeless 0.2 is available which has more features and bug-fixes than you can shake a stick at," Mozilla Labs' Lloyd Hilaiel announced.

Chromeless is an interesting project over at Mozilla Labs which aims to enable developers to create their own apps using Firefox's underpinnings.

It's similar to the now defunct Prism project or to the way you can create custom app links with Google Chrome, but Chromeless goes way beyond that.

In essence, it enables developers to create desktop apps using standard web technologies, in this sense it's more similar to Adobe AIR, but instead of Flash, it uses HTML5, JavaScript and so on.

The big change in Chromeless 0.2 is the switch to Firefox 4 as the underlying engine powering each app, which adds improved support for HTML5, hardware acceleration, multi-touch support and many other capabilities.

One new feature that should really come in handy for anyone developing with Chromeless is the ability to easily create a packaged, standalone app which they can than distribute.

"The appify command will allow you to combine the Chromeless platform with your application code to generate a standalone redistributable version of your app," Mozilla explained.

There is also a new Menu API which, aptly enough, enables developers to create application menus. Embedding web content inside the app has been improved, the feature comes with more tools for monitoring the progress as well as modifying the web content.

You can get more details about the many new features in the Mozilla blog post. You can also expect Chromeless 0.3 to be ready a lot sooner than the six months it took the team to push out this second release.