What benefits are there of using Mozilla Prism, or Site-Specific-Browsers?

Question

I'm exploring the benefits of using Mozilla Prism (Site-Specific-Browsers), for one of our enterprise level products.

It makes a lot of sense to the web-development team, - they get to focus only on one browser (layout engine); - the time to develop-test-rollout new features is drastically cut down; - and training is a easier to the "non-web-savvy" users.

But there are also some serious disadvantages that we foresee, such as - user would be tied to a custom client (customized Mozilla Prism in my case). - secondly those users trying to access the applications from random computers would always need to get the client, which might become annoying.

I'm open to all of your thoughts and experiences if any in using Site-Specific-Browsers (SSBs) or Mozilla Prism in particular.

Answer 1

I guess it all depends. On the one hand, locking into a browser that does a good job of supporting web standards is ok (better than locking into an IE/Trident browser) but on the other hand locking in to any browser seems like a bad idea (IMHO).

For the most part, whatever you gain from locking into Mozilla Prism (feature wise) you can likely get out of other browsers with a little tweaking (e.g. for SVG/CANVAS support in IE there are several workarounds available).

There are 2 "real" gains I see:

1.) Is the time saved by not testing/tweaking for other browsers - however this is mostly a one-time issue... once tweaked you should be good to go.

2.) Chrome. If you want your application to look and feel like an application and not like a web based application... then Prism might be exactly what you want!