Mozilla Abandons Prism, Will Now Focus on Chromeless

Mozilla has announced that Prism, a project which enabled users to run web applications like native ones, as much as possible, essentially by running them in a stripped down version of Firefox, will now be folded into Chromeless, an ambitious new project from Mozilla Labs with somewhat similar, if broader, goals.

"The Prism project was launched in 2007 with a primary goal of Integrating Web applications into the User’s desktop experience," Mozilla wrote.

"Recently, browsers have begun to explore ways to solve a lot of the same problems that Prism set out to solve: specifically, improving the discovery and launch experience of the Web applications that you care about the most," it added.

"The Chromeless project was announced in 2010 and was built with the goal of 'Making it possible to prototype browser applications in Web technologies'. The project itself is technically very similar to Prism," it explained.

Prism was actively developed until about a year ago. It comes as a Firefox add-on and enables you to create a desktop shortcut to any website.

You can then run that website or web app as a stand-alone app using Firefox without any of the UI elements. This works for some web apps, but there are some caveats. Prism also only works with Firefox 3.6.

At the same time, Chromeless enables anyone to build on top of Firefox, creating their own custom UI for the browser or, indeed, a hybrid native app built with web technologies.

Like Mozilla mentions, Chromeless can replicate pretty much anything that Prism does, but it goes way beyond what Prism has to offer. So the decision was made to stop maintaining Prism and instead focus on Chromeless and other projects like Open Web Apps or even the Add-on SDK which replicate much of the functionality while adding a lot more potential.