Webrunner and Prism

Mozilla has a couple programs out that have been getting attention. I'm not sure whether to call them Web browsers or not - what they are.

Webrunner is a stripped-down HTML displayer that has no menu, no address bar, just the HTML canvas.

Prism seems to be a program that automates the creation of these webapps, creating shortcuts to be run in XULRunner. (I'm not sure if there's any difference between the Prism XULRunner and Webrunner.)

There's been some debate out there as to whether these are useful programs to run web-based applications or not. I've given it a quick try with a few sites (Facebook, Meebo, Gmail and Kingdom of Loathing), and it's pretty nice for the sort of "stand alone" sites that otherwise just sit in a tab. I haven't tried it with Google Docs yet, but that could be the killer app for this thing. And Webrunner works great on Xubuntu, where opening Firefox just to check my email is a pain.

There are a couple drawbacks so far, though - no Adblock and no easy way to send off-site links back to Firefox. But it's a good start.