Mozilla

Today, WebRunner is becoming a Mozilla Labs project. We are also rebranding WebRunner as Prism, see the announcement for more details. Alex Faaborg also has a post covering some of the user experience goals for Prism. Mozilla Labs gives us access to a user feedback forum, support infrastructure and some great resources for planning, designing and implementing features.

One new feature we added to WebRunner is web application styling or theming. You can drop a “webapp.css” file in the bundle and it will be applied to the hosted web application. You can also use platform-specific folders in the bundle to apply specific CSS based on the current platform (Windows, Mac or Linux). We’ll put more details up on the wiki when the feature is released. In the meantime, here is a screenshot of Google Reader hosted in WebRunner, running on Mac, using Jon Hicks’ excellent CSS theme.

Yesterday, I did my best to convince a bunch of smart, young developers that I was an expert at building extensions for Mozilla applications. It must have worked, they didn’t heckle me out of the room. Seneca’s Dave Humphrey and Chris Tyler have a great group of students working on Mozilla (and other Open Source) projects. I have been impressed with the types of projects the Seneca students completed in the past. This group of students and projects are just as impressive. I got a chance to talk to a few students after the presentation and hope to continue working with the group via IRC or anytime I happen to be at Seneca (like next week).

Its been just over 2 weeks since we released WebRunner 0.7 and lots of people have tried it out (over 6500 downloads). We have been following blog posts, articles and comments to gather as much feedback as possible. Thanks for everyone who has taken the time to try WebRunner. Even more thanks to those who gave us feedback or made your own webapp bundles. Here’s a summary of what we learned:

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart has a post on the friction between Open Web advocates and “RIA vendors”. I think Ryan does a good job describing the work being done at Adobe (and Microsoft) to become active in a larger ecosystem, namely open source and cross-platform. There are a couple bits I want to respond (emphasis mine):

Mozilla endeavors to promote open standards, while at the same time, create a better Web, even if it means using the “other guys” specifications and DOM extensions. Here is a summary of features added to Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) that either implement a good open specification or someone else’s DOM extensions - for the betterment of the Web:

I’ll be taking part in the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) hosted at Seneca College. In addition to the symposium tracks, there is also a set of workshops. Checkout the various speakers and topics. There’s lots of good stuff going on. Seneca’s deep involvement with open source has always impressed me.