I stumbled on this piece of news today. This was definitely under my radar – although for a good reason. I wasn’t even watching for it (* adds Mozilla Labs feed to Bloglines *).

Apparently this project was formerly known as WebRunner. The idea is to make popular web applications available directly from one’s desktop, as if the applications were actual installed software on the user’s computer.

Such applications include Google Mail, Google Calendar, Digg, and others. They are ones normally accessed via the web browser.

But Prism is an application built with XULRunner, so that web apps are accessed through a browser-like interface, but it’s not really a browser. Prism just ties it all together. It doesn’t have the usual menus and buttons found in a browser. This makes the web applications used through Prism seem a little closer to the desktop than normally. Specific web apps can be just a click away, without needing to use an actual browser. Another benefit is that it will be cross-platform – Windows-only right now, Linux and Mac versions on the way. And of course, it’s open source. Good to see folks out there continuing to build open-source apps for the world.

Prism is like a browser in that it is built on top of the Firefox 3 core, so we KNOW it will do well at rendering pages and keeping bad code/markup in line.

Alex Faaborg gives some more information than is available in the official news release. There is also a wiki for the Prism project. And Mark Finkle provides more techie details behind the software.

At this point, Prism is really an experiment in improving integration between the desktop and web applications. It will be evolving, and there is already a good list of suggested improvements/additions on the wiki page.

This is an interesting technology, and I will certainly be running it through some paces in the next while. It helps to blur the lines between a computer desktop and web-based applications, and I think it is a clever approach.