Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser

MB sent out a cool article about yet another app racing for domination of our desktops!

Even though Firefox 3 hasn’t been released, Mozilla is already teasing features that will be included in FF4:

At the moment, these are two separate projects Mozilla is running to push out the edges of the browser: Prism and Weave.

Prism

Prism is Mozilla's shot at busting apps out of the browser. Part of the Prism project is making the browsing core available to apps developers so they can build products like Zimbra Desktop (review) that are essentially Web apps, but that don't look like it.

The dream is to be able to take any Web site or app and turn it into an app that can run directly from the desktop. A very big part of this initiative is to make sites/apps work when they are not connected to the Internet. HTML 5 (the next version of the basic standard for the encoding of Web sites) includes explicit support for local, offline resources.

HTML 5 and Prism will, Mozilla execs say, render Google Gears obsolete. Not to mention other important, and proprietary, Web app platforms that are already in production, like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight (What is Silverlight?).