

Mozilla Chromeless: making desktop apps with web technologies - fdb
http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/02/prism-is-now-chromeless/

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jbermudes
Does anyone else wish that we could have the opposite? Web apps with desktop
technology?

It seems strange that 20 years later the crude stateless hypertext technology
designed to share physics documents has been hacked to serve desktop-wannabe
apps. Yes, we all love the web's easy and ubiquitous deployment benefits, but
what have we traded in exchange for that?

We've long since solved the problem of laying out desktop apps or printed
materials. But it seems every time I read about CSS or Ajax hacks to get
something similar to a desktop-style interaction it just boggles my mind at
how much cruft we have to tack on to make the browser pretend to be a desktop
system. Nowhere is this more apparent than the HTML5/canvas game development
scene. While I'm cheering for open standards as much as the next guy, it's
disappointing that a modern computer with its Gigahertz CPUs has trouble
rendering a game that 20 years ago was being ran on CPUs in the tens of MHz
range. We herald frameworks as our salvation, but these extra layers of
abstraction will only serve to slow performance.

The Java applet, everyone's favorite web app bastard child was IMO at least a
step in a (not the only) right direction. It would be cool if browsers
supported a sandboxed execution environment that used a common open bytecode
technology that allowed for languages other than javascript to be used
(client-side python would be cool), and provided a common library for UI
development and layout similar to what Java Swing has. It seems that everyone
would love applets if they were introduced today using an open standard,
implemented by the browser by default, and without everyone's memories of the
horrible performance over dialup on orders of magnitude slower hardware and
the whole Java/Sun thing.

Maybe it's time that we started looking for successors to HTTP and HTML
designed with webapps/games in mind.

~~~
bruceboughton
>> We've long since solved the problem of laying out desktop apps or printed
materials.

We've long since solved the problem of world peace and disappearing socks.

UI layout != print layout. And it's not really clear that we've solved UI
layout any more than we've solved web layout. In fact, there's a bit of a
trend in desktop UI layout towards web-like technologies such as DOM and
stylesheets. Look at WPF and XAML, for example.

~~~
Qz
WPF/XAML is terribly obnoxious as a layout system. Spark in Flex 4 is a much
more reasonable system, and even then it still has its annoying foibles.

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emehrkay
Who remembers a few years back when Adobe Air was first making waves and
Mozilla introduced Prism and Adobe's pr team hit the web to discredit it? Good
times

Anyway, we've _developed_ an internal app at my job targeting webkit on os x
and we required the use of fluid, it was very nice not to have to worry about
cross-browser issues. Shout out to Air as I understand and Prism (now
Chromeless), more people should use this tech

~~~
mgutz
We're doing the same using Google Chrome Packaged Applications, which is based
on Webkit. We use FireBreath NPAPI extensions for any OS specific
enhancements. The end result is noticeably faster than AIR and less resources.

Chromeless sounds like a good idea but Google's V8 engine has been spanking
Mozilla's engine for a while now.

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chime
Not a lot of people know this but the recent version of Chrome supports
running any web-page as its own app. Try it out from Settings [wrench icon] >
Tools > Create Application Shortcut. It's great for todo apps or gmail. I know
it works on Windows. The link seems to be grayed out in my OSX box for some
reason.

~~~
nicpottier
As you said, not in OS X.

They are working on it in theory, though I'm not sure what is taking so long:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13148>

~~~
mgutz
There's a simple AppleScript which lets you do it though. I'm not on my
Macbook otherwise I'd leave a link.

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pedanticfreak
Is Mozilla intentionally trying to create market confusion? It isn't obvious
from the name, but this is built on XULRunner and has no relation to Google
Chrome.

~~~
jokermatt999
Browser "Chrome" has been a term that's been around for ages. The confusion
can be blamed on Google, actually.

~~~
lazylland
Yes, but using "Chromeless" after the fact that Chrome is now considered as a
browser name is asking for trouble.

It could have been a nice code name for the project, though :)

~~~
carussell
If you think that "Chrome" was chosen for any reason other than a direct
reference to the widespread usage of the term with regard to Mozilla, you're
crazy; i.e., if you have an agenda to name someone to blame for muddying the
waters, pointing the finger at the Chrome team would be far more apropos.

