I’ve seen several blog posts saying that Mozilla Prism is an open source alternative to Adobe AIR, or that the two products do more or less the same thing. Even Michael Chambers said something along those lines in his blog:
So, I guess the thing I found odd was Mozilla appears to be building something very similar to Adobe AIR (which is fine and cool), but somehow it is inherently good when Mozilla does it, and inherently evil when Adobe does it.
But I have to say that Adobe AIR and Prism are definitely not the same thing. Yes, they both can run a web app “outside” the browser. That sounds like it should make them very similar, but it doesn’t:
- Who is it for?
AIR is for developers. It lets you package a web application to deliver it to the user as a stand-alone app. Prism doesn’t.
Prism is for users, and it resembles bookmarks more than anything else. Except that the bookmark is an icon on your computer and when you click on it, the browser doesn’t have any toolbars.
- Functionality:
AIR provides some desktop-like functionality like local file access, SQL storage, etc. In this, it resembles Google Gears a bit. AIR provides some additional tools that Gears lacks.
Prism provides nothing more than what any web browser provides.
As a result, AIR supports web apps that can be used offline and Prism doesn’t.
As I said in my last post, if you were to combine Prism and Gears you could get something a more like an AIR alternative (but with fewer features).
