Just a few days ago, a new Mozilla project came to my attention, Prism. Prism is an application that lets you take web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. You may wonder what is the point of running websites, or web applications if you rather, out of the web browser.  When using it, I mainly concentrated on the Google Suite of web applications, iGoogle, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google reader. These ran exactly the same as they normally would in a browser environment.

My first impressions of this were that it is simple to set up and works just as I would have expected it. I eventually questioned the need for having this. I eventually worked out why this is something for me. When using the browser, I always have at least ten to fifteen tabs open at a time, right from when I start the browser, right to the moment I close the browser. My default tabs are always there displaying websites I commonly use. If I am connected to the internet, this application does seem somewhat useless but if you needed to say, view your email and/or calendar without opening a browser and loading a dozen or so tabs, it is much more efficient to just open up the desktop app.

Another thing that this will be aiming for is offline web applications. Using the same conditions as before, instead of opening your browser and having all you tabs come up with the “page not displayed” error or having to even have all your tabs open in your browser, it is easier to access offline capable apps using Prism. I feel that the two main reasons they are developing something like that it to combine those two aspects, having the web application in its own environment out of the browser and to enrich the offline aspect of future web applications.

I can see future potential in this application and can see it being greatly linked with Google’s web applications as well as their Gear’s Offline application. All three of these things linked can make functionality of web applications greatly improve and be more accessible and useful when disconnected from the internet. What I personally would like to see is Google embrace this application to create a Google Web Suite application using Prism with tabs with access, online and offline, to all its web applications in its own environment out of the clutter of the browser and other websites. I can’t wait to see Prism blossom into something great and very useful.