The Prism project (formerly WebRunner[1] has recently been announced by Mozilla Labs.

In this announcement, a sentence has been ruffling a few feathers at Adobe and Microsoft (emphasis mine):




So, in a way, Adobe and Mozilla moves are the same, except that Adobe promotes their proprietary technologies, while Mozilla promotes the Open Web and make its applications easier to use and more integrated with the desktop. Proprietary technologies give more control and power to the software vendors, while Open technologies (like the Open Web) give more freedom to the users. By promoting proprietary technologies, Adobe and Microsoft are trying to squeeze more value from the developers and pass it over to their shareholders. By doing the same around open technologies, Mozilla is creating value for the public good.

P.S.Oh, I have found in this comment to the Microsoft post something very similar to my thinking:

MS says "Write a web application using Silverlight and you can get desktop integration". Adobe says "Write a web application using AIR and you can get desktop integration". Mozilla says "write a website *without* doing anything special, and *we* will take care of desktop integration".


[1] You can find more details about Prism on Mark Finkle's post and on the Prism forum.