WebRunner Vs Adobe AIR shootout : My views

I have been keeping a causal watch of what Mark Finkle has been upto with WebRunner. And this post is in reference to the the debate between the warring camps, mark finkle from mozilla,working on WebRunner and Ryan Stewart with Adobe, talking about Adobe AIR. They have been exchanging some thoughts, I thought i would as well.

Here it is ...

webrunner

adobe air

having site specific browsers seemed like a gud idea. I dont want to open stuff in new tabs . How about having a different desktop Firefox Instance (FYI:i dint say 'process') for every SSB. no "virtual machine"ish sort of setup, but simply is Firefox-tweaked and called WebRunner as the run-time for apps target users: people who like a seperate webrunner for each site upside : (yet to find any !) downside & what i would have liked to see : why on earth would i want something that gives absolutely no value to me as a developer !!! if webrunner concentrated on building a class library with decent system access documentation(sorry to say,i still dont find the mozilla docs on these half as useful or readable compared to say flex docs). forget even building your own, atleast i shud have interfaces in webrunner for all possible classes and then plug'n'play with js libraries like jquery /dojo or hell make a new project on mozilla just to create just the plug'n'play interfaces for webrunner first,and maybe a decent js api for creating,accessing SVG. It really pisses me off every time webrunner is compared to adobe air. its beyond comparison, mozilla and webrunner cannot be sit back on the laurels of firefox for the success of webrunner. instead it shud actually code a class library that can be shipped with webrunners or ssb's or whatever 'schemes' Mark Finkle has on his mind. Coz personally webrunner does'nt even seem like an app worth talking just because it's stripping off the firefox browser. The first Webrunner was prototyped in 06, and not one new feature that was'nt courtesy of firefox! That's sad even compared to the progress made by silverlight - a late entrant! Webrunner, needs to innovate as well, and quick - if it wants to really play with in the big league !

having flash apps work for the desktop seems like a gud idea. I don't want to open a browser for every flash app. How about having a single desktop run-time for all adobe air apps "Virtual Machine"ish Adobe AIR is the run-time for my apps target users: people who like a seperate webrunner for each site downside: another process clobbering with my cpu memory if it becomes popular ! upside : adobe has effectively solved a major porting problem by allowing flash developers to write in a language they prefer, and access the beautiful and growing class libraries for everything from system ,to math,to vector graphics. what i would have liked to see : just keep it going ... and don't bloat the runtime size too quickly!

By the way,i'm not biased towards any one side (or the third - silverlight 8 ) ), but have always respected both mozilla, firefox and everyone involved ; as well as the phenomenal innovation shown by adobe with flex and apollo.

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