Webrunner

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.

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:

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.

After much fooling around, WebRunner 0.7 is ready to release. This release has some small changes and some big changes.

Cesar has release an alpha release of WebRunner deployed as a Firefox extension and launched using Firefox as the runtime. That’s right, delivered using Firefox’s extension mechanism and launched using Firefox’s runtime. No XULRunner needed for this deployment. It seems to work on Linux, but we need to make some changes for Windows and Mac. Also, check out some of the WebRunner Planning discussion to see what ideas are being kicked around.

Okay, maybe my tongue-in-cheek, roasting of Ryan Stewart didn’t go over so well. But, at one point in the post/rant I mention working on a project called WebRunner that, IMO, is a competitor to Adobe AIR. I, unsurprisingly, feel that WebRunner does a better job complementing the Web and is a better fit for web applications in general. Both systems allow developers to run rich internet applications (defined as you wish) on the desktop. That’s in itself is both novel and interesting to many developers. However, I think WebRunner and AIR are suited to slightly different applications.