The buzz on the web today is all about Mozilla’s new experiment, dubbed Prism. At first, I was thinking, ”
Hey - this is just like Adobe AIR, minus the flash, but it’s probably open source.” I think competition for AIR is healthy, and while Adobe is usually a benevolent monopoly, it’d be nice to be able fall back on some open source web-to-desktop software. Why did I think this? The Prism site compares itself to Silverlight and AIR:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

Then I read the rest of the article.

Essentially, Prism looks like an extra nice way to bookmark sites you use on the web. It’s like Firefox minus Chrome. “LabRats,” the author of the announcement responds to the critique of an AIR fan in a way that confirms my disappointment:

…we don’t do anything to close the web platform. We simply provide you with a dedicated window to an application running on that platform. It’s the same as if you had opened a new window in Firefox and loaded the application there, but without the browser chrome to get in your way.

Leave it up to Web 2.0 to hype up something product that actually offers less than it’s predecessor.