Mozilla Prism is a new add-on for Firefox that can be used to turn any web page into a standalone application on Windows.
Beta 3 of Mozilla Prism 1.0 has just been released and it is probably a good point in time to find out more about Prism. In particular, what is Mozilla Prism’s purpose and why would you want to use it.
The core idea behind Mozilla Prism is to separate web content from the browser UI. It allows you to turn any web page into a standalone application that only displays the service and no UI elements (such as the browser’s address bar)
There are a few advantages, but also disadvantages, when it comes to running websites in their own application window instead of running them in the web browser.
Advantages include an increase in stability of the system as the application window is independent from the browser window. Since you may run multiple sites at the same time in the browser, one of those sites may affect the overall performance or even crash the entire browser (Firefox has no multi-process architecture yet where this cannot happen).
Mozilla Prism
The application window inherits all the benefits of desktop programs which means that you can run it at system start or minimize it to the system tray to let it run in the background.
Prism is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computer systems. To use it, simply tap on the Alt-key while on the page that you want to turn into its own app and select Tools > Convert Website to Application from the menu bar.
The extension’s add-on page has not been updated as of now and the last version of Prism that is offered there for download is not compatible with Firefox 3.6 yet. It will take less than 24 hours for the page to be updated with the latest version that is compatible with Firefox 3.6
Prism can be downloaded from the Mozilla website or the Prism project page. Please note that it is not compatible with recent versions of Prism.
Update: Mozilla has discontinued Prism. While the add-on is still listed on the Mozilla Add-ons website, it is not compatible with recent versions of the Firefox browser anymore. It seems unlike that the project will be revitalized in the near future.
Mozilla launched Chromeless after discontinuing Prism. Chromeless was designed to build a web browser using only web technologies such as HTML. JavaScript and CSS. The project has been discontinued in 2011.