Mozilla: Firefox is our RIA platform

This is an example of another step we're taking to help these applications get an equal footing with desktop applications when you're offline.

SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews: If what you're saying is really the trend of how things are going...you could describe Firefox in an entirely new way: as a JavaScript platform with a built-in Gecko rendering engine that has the convenient add-on feature of being able to render Web pages.

MIKE BELTZNER: What I would say is, these technologies that we've developed are equal to any other technology for building a rich, interactive, functional application. The advantage [is that it adheres] to Web standards, that it doesn't need a computer to run -- [instead], it needs any sort of computing device and platform. So as we move our engineering effort into the mobile world, all of a sudden, you can see something where your mail application works on the desktop, on your mobile device, and it's your full mail application. It's not some small version, some midlet that you've sent to your mobile device. It is a full mail app, and you're just viewing it differently.

Of course, your ability to interact through a smaller device is a little more limited in terms of the screen size, so you will probably not do as much writing there. But you still get the full functionality.

SCOTT FULTON: You find a way to use the network to distribute the processing, and the client as just a renderer of the finished process.

MIKE BELTZNER: Yea...and then the client does some processing; the client-side JavaScript UI stuff. But you can outsource the heavy processing.

There's an online video editing application now where you can upload your MP4 video, and you can do things like complex digital effects. And it sends all that complex digital effects rendering out to a render farm, and shows you little low-fi clips on the Web page. Then when you're ready to do the final render, it sends you back the big MP4 file. So once again, you've benefitted from the distributed processing.

You asked earlier what this means for the browser...I think the browser still has a place on the desktop, and on anybody's desktop, because it's the thing you use to browse. When you build this open source, open standard technology stack, what we have seen is an explosion in innovation and participation online. What we've seen is, you get cool applications and mashups and new things, and there still needs to be a way to find those applications. And the browser is that; it is the thing you use to go around, connect with different people, different bits of information.

What Prism allows you to do is literally reflect some of those applications through a prism down to your desktop, where they become different things -- full-fledged applications. Going over to the mobile side, you can see applications that you can download from the Web to your mobile phone, so you can go to Google Maps and say, "You know what, I want Google Maps to be on my phone. I don't need to download a mobile application; I just need to browse to the Web page, present it down to my phone, and my phone runs all these things -- JavaScript and DOM and HTML."

SCOTT FULTON: If we start implementing a kind of a model where online publishers become, in a sense, much more applications providers than Web page providers, will we start to see a diminishing, over the years, of the need for the kind of HTML Web page that currently defines a publication such as BetaNews, for instance, and more of a need for a unique application model where CNN becomes an application, BetaNews becomes an application, Time.com, BBC, all of these are programs that work in their own unique way?

MIKE BELTZNER: I'm not sure. We're getting into predictions, and the fun part about predictions is that I'll be able to look back in three years and see just how wrong I was.

I think you're going to get special-case applications for -- and this is me talking more as a user experience person -- specific tasks, for things like the banking that I'm going to do, or plotting my route on a subway. I think reading news and getting information, and especially interacting with different people's opinions, you might have agents that help direct you to those resources, but I think those resources will remain as HTML just because it's so easy to publish them. I think what you're going to continue to see, though, is an uptick on the explosion of information and the freedom of allowing anybody to write and to publish this information and aggregate it, and especially a new, post karma-based system where people with strong, good opinions will end up being just as notable as famous journalists.

SCOTT FULTON: I don't know whether that means I'm in trouble or not.