The difference with open source is you have the keys to the car and own all the parts. Whether Mozilla continues to share the driving chores with you or even has the same destination is another matter.

Your point about commitment to the platform is well-taken. Nonetheless, I think you undervalue the vision behind Prism. Certainly the project is still very early stage, and it’s reasonable to question whether Mozilla can compete with Adobe given the resources being invested in their respective projects. The IDE issue is also a big one. The initiatives taken by ActiveState with OpenKomodo and SnapDragon are promising but I’m not sure what the current status is.

I think the questions Mozilla needs to answer are:
- What is the long-term vision for Prism?
- How will it compete with AIR as a platform for RIAs?
- What is the IDE strategy?

There should be a good answer to the last question since Prism uses open web technologies, but personally I’m not sure what is the best way to design, implement and debug Prism applications.

The comment from Mitchell was jumped on not because people mis-read it, as you seems to suggest, and thought it meant Mozilla was abandoning XULRunner. The reaction was equivalent to “you might as well be abandoning it if you are not going to market it properly and develop it as a genuine platform competitor for developers to use on the desktop without the limitations of a quasi-desktop web browser (Prism).

I personally believe that once performance/memory management problems are solved – and it seems there’s a lot of success with the memory allocator research – “XULrunner” could be a better cross-platform application foundation than GTK+ and certainly the bloatware that is Java.

It’s as simple this: when the world needs a great cross-platform application development foundation, and MoFoCo has one, why aren’t they “going for it”?

- Where’s the long-awaited IDE?
- Where’s the decent doco?
- Where’s the roadmap and accountability to developers who choose to stake their projects/businesses/lives on XULrunner?

I’m afraid launching a genuine ‘runtime’ requires a bit more than the occasional obscure blog post.

Compared to Firefox 3 I’ve lost Ctrl-+ to zoom, there’s no spell-check in text fields, link URLs don’t appear in my status bar, right-click on link doesn’t have Open Link in New Tab or the rest of my FF link context menu, middle-click doesn’t pan the window, I can’t search in text with Ctrl-F or Quick Find, etc., etc.

Maybe the meat of the Flash app makes this reduced functionality and browser inconsistency worthwhile, but I haven’t even got to it and I miss the *real* Web experience in my browser of choice.

Check out apps like:

Buzzword:
- http://about.buzzword.com/

Picnik:
- http://www.picnik.com/

And the Google Analytics AIR app, which looks like it will be hosted and supported by Google itself, which is huge news I’d say:
- http://www.riapedia.com/2008/01/16/google_officially_supporting_air_analytics_application

You’re probably right to call me out on my assessment of the relative strengths of Adobe and Mozilla in the upcoming runtime wars. Both are very strong contenders (with Google an interesting dark horse, which I’ll be writing about today). I’m sure I’ll be writing loads more about this.

My impression is that the whole firefox -app was practically a one-man effort by Benjamin (someone please correct me if I’m wrong about this). So I’m sure Mark is right that it isn’t being publicized or supported by Mozilla right now, but they’ll come around when they realize how huge it is. I’m not sure what the “downsides” he mentions are but I’ll ask him.

And yes, like all apps that run on standard XULRunner, Prism can be run using firefox -app.

b) Provide a link to a simple XULRunner app for some of those 150 million to try.

c) Lots of MDC docs like The_Joy_of_XUL don’t mention FF3’s integration of XULRunner.

I’d be far more likely to try Songbird, Flock, Komodo, etc. and Prism if they were smaller XUL packages I could run with the Firefox -app trick instead of yet another executable.

Prism is still a .exe download, not a XULRunner package.

Macromedia-now-Adobe keep rhapsodizing about great Flash Central/Flex/AIR/whatever apps, but they optimistically overlook Flash’s failings and none has been remotely as compelling as a great Web 2.0 app like Zoho, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc.

One is the seamless install feature. You can automagically install your app and the runtime in one process started by a SWF running in the Flash Player. Pretty slick.
- http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air_badge_install.html

The other is, by opting your application in, you can communicate from the Flash Player in the browser to an AIR app. You can detect if a particular application is installed, and you can launch it from the browser.
- http://blogs.adobe.com/simplicity/2007/12/beta_3_and_the_browser_api.html

“The player with the strongest cards, however, is Mozilla. Unlike Adobe and Microsoft, they have a true killer app in the form of Firefox. When its 150 million odd users…”

Actually I would say Adobe has the strongest cards. Their killer app is Flash Player, and they are leveraging it as stated above. And the Flash Player’s some 3 billion installations dwarfs the Mozilla install base.

Also, all their install and distribution stories work across browsers, not on just one.

Also, the XULRunner in Firefox 3 isn’t really meant to be used, let alone supported:
“If it seems like we don’t want to promote running XUL-based applications using Firefox 3 as the runtime – good! This is very experimental and there are down-sides. There are no current plans to expand or extend the feature.”
- http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2007/08/firefox-3-xul-application-runtime/

AIR has full support from Adobe and is actually intended to be used as an application runtime.

Also, are you saying that Prism will use the XULRunner in Firefox?