Mozilla Labs rolled out the first official beta of "Prism" a week or so ago and, ImHO, it's pretty swell. If you've ever wished that you could just sort of pull a web-based application over onto your desktop, Prism is your wish granted.
This was originally the partly-baked "Webrunner" idea from a few years ago, but Prism is not just a renamed new release of that. II seems like they took the base concept of Webrunner but for the most part went back and started over. The new "Prism" was announced about a year ago and lots of testing and tweaking in alpha since. The Prism beta seems pretty firm and well made.
There's some talk comparing Prism to Adobe's "Flash" or "Air" or Microsoft's "Silverlight" or other similar web development platforms but Prism is very different from those. Those are all essentially p-machine interpreter engines -- that is: web-app "platforms" upon which web apps can be built.
Instead of that, the way that it looks to me is that Prism is a sort of pseudo web environment or envelope. Yeah; envelope. The idea is that you can pull down any web-based app -- including, as far as I can see, apps built with the aforementioned platforms -- and set them up to run on your desktop without the web being active.
Very cool. Very, very useful. And pretty close to a wish granted.
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