Two Cool Mozilla Projects You May Not Know About

It’s not hard to be a fan of Mozilla – they have some great products, offer some great resources like the Mozilla Development Center, and supports Web standards in general.

Here are two projects that Mozilla heads up but haven’t received as much press as some of their other efforts, probably because they are still under development.

XULRunner. The best introduction to XULRunner may be Wikipedia’s: “XULRunner is a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation for providing a common back-end for XUL applications.”

XULRunner is my personal favorite of upcoming Mozilla projects. It will allow developers to use XUL – Mozilla’s “XML User Interface Language” – to build cross-platform (desktop) applications that can do all sorts of cool things. XUL should be a technology that comes naturally to most Web developers.

While XUL provides the framework to build the applications themselves, XULRunner will provide an easy means of installing, removing, and upgrading these applications. In sum, XULRunner (with XUL) will make it easier for developers with certain skill sets to deploy desktop applications. Here’s a list of some XULRunner applications.

Prism. Mozilla describes Prism as one of, or a result of

“a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.“

To summarize: Prism will help bridge experiences of desktop and Web applications. It will allow users to run Web applications directly on the Desktop, fully integrated into the desktop itself, wither the user is running Linux, Mac, or Windows. Prism also wants to let Web applications use features of the user’s environment or hardware – such as offline data storage and graphics cards.

I’m pretty excited about these projects and look forward to observing the development of these applications as they more forward.