Back in 2007, Mozilla launched the Prism effort to create web applications that could run on the desktop. Essentially Prism offered users a way to run a browser loaded to a specific web application.
After a couple of years of active development, Prism development stalled in February of 2010 and there have been no updates about the project or its releases — until now. Prism could run as an add-on for Firefox (but only 3.6.x and not 4), and as such Firefox 4 Beta users have been missing out on what I believe to be – a fantastic Mozilla technology.
I personally have no idea why Mozilla stopped working on Prism or why it didn’t get updated to the Firefox 4 era. The first news that I’ve seen on Prism in nearly a year came this week with the announcement from Mozilla that Prism is now being integrated into Chromeless — Mozilla’s effort to enable users to build thin browsers.
Interesting idea – but a mistake (in the short term) in my view.