The app is getting close to its first major release

Jan 14, 2010 11:11 GMT  ·  By
Mozilla Prism is getting close to it first major release with the 1.0 beta3
6 photos
   Mozilla Prism is getting close to it first major release with the 1.0 beta3

Web apps are becoming increasingly important and powerful. And thanks to great support from the likes of Google, a lot faster too. Things like Google Docs, Gmail and especially more advanced tools like web photo editors can be a welcome alternative for desktop apps but, at the end of the day, we're still stuck with our desktop OS, at least until Chrome OS comes along. And some people are just more comfortable with the desktop app paradigm which is where tools like Mozilla Prism come in. Prism, which is getting ready for its first final release with Prism 1.0 beta3, enables users to quickly create a wrapper around a web app and use it like any other piece of software they have installed on their computer.

Prism developer Matthew Gertner has now released the third beta of Prism 1.0, which has been in the works for a quite while. It's technically a testing version of the beta 3 as it isn't available from the official site yet, but most likely it's the same code that gets pushed to all users on the Prism site. The third beta is built on top of Firefox 3.6, so you'll get to take advantage of all the new features and performance gains in the latest Firefox build.

"Quite a few bugs have been fixed since Prism 1.0b2, so I’ve made new builds for Mac and Windows. Please take a look and let me know if you have any problems. Once they’ve been tested a bit, I’ll put them up on the Prism website as 1.0b3," Gertner writes. He also lists the biggest bug fixes and updates.

Prism does exactly what you'd expect, it enables you to create shortcuts to dedicated stand-alone desktop versions of your favorite web apps. Prism comes in two flavors, a dedicated desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux (the Linux version doesn't get a beta3 yet) or a Firefox add-on. The add-on version, adds a new entry to the right-click menu making it trivial to create shortcuts to any website you want.

With the stand-alone one, you have to enter a URL, choose the shortcuts you want to create, and that's pretty much it. Depending on the selections you make, Prism will have a very light UI with some navigational buttons and a status bar, or even no UI whatsoever. Other than that, it just works like the web app would in any other browser, actually exactly like in Firefox. Google Chrome for Windows also offers the built-in option to create a stand-alone app and it works very similar to Prism. And, of course, Adobe AIR is designed with pretty much the same goal in mind, to bring web-apps to the desktop, though it’s designed primarily for Flash applications.

Mozilla Prism 1.0 beta3 (add-on) for Firefox is available for download here. Mozilla Prism 1.0 beta3 (stand-alone) for Windows is available for download here. Mozilla Prism 1.0 beta3 (stand-alone) for Mac is available for download here.

Photo Gallery (6 Images)

Mozilla Prism is getting close to it first major release with the 1.0 beta3
The Mozilla Prism stand-alone version app creation dialog on WindowsThe Mozilla Prism stand-alone version app creation dialog
+3more