The Pencil Project, Prism and the browser as platform

The Pencil Project extension brings the power of prototyping and simple GUI development to Firefox 3.

It takes advantage of Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine for an easy-to-use application for making layouts. You can import bitmap images, add rich text or plain text, and when you’re done, export your drawing as a PNG file.

One downside: it runs inside of Firefox. You have to start Firefox in order to use Pencil. It is, however, free and open source. I used it (briefly) on a Mac running Leopard (10.5.4) with no problems. It’s also been tested on GNU/Linux, Windows XP and Vista.

Prism and other single-site / site-specific browsers

The richness of the Pencil Project made me think about the browser as an application environment. And that brings me to Prism (formerly WebRunner), Mozilla’s single-site browser project.

Prism — available as its own package and as a Firefox extension — lets you turn any web site into a quasi-standalone application.

At first glance, a single-site browser seems pointless — dude, just open another tab. But I find that the minimal GUI of an SSB really lets me focus on the task at hand. It’s particularly nice when used with web applications such as Google or Zoho, or blogging interfaces.

Prism isn’t the only single-site browser available. Mac users, can check Fluid, which is based on WebKit/Safari. Windows users have Bubbles.

Browser as platform = The future of applications?

Today, you still need an operating system on which to run Firefox and Prism. But is there room for a super-minimal OS with a Gecko-based (or WebKit-based, etc.) GUI? I’m thinking about one that runs web applications in a single-site browser (gOS is close, as is the iPhone) and still allows for richer applications such as the Pencil Project (Flock skims the surface of this). As both browsers and the languages we use to develop web sites become more powerful and feature-rich, (when?) will the browser truly become the operating system, rather than run on top of it?