I don't think there's much of a change of this ever happening - the "reasons" are obvious - people would like to use Safari, Chrome, or Opera - but developers have repeatedly made clear that they have no interest in going that way because of the work involved, the advantages lost etc.
There are alternatives to Zotero for those for whom this is such a big issue. (specifically for Mac both Papers and Mendeley seem quite good, though not as good as Zotero+FF).

the "reasons" are obvious - people would like to use Safari, Chrome, or Opera

What does that have to do with having a standalone app? There's nothing preventing a Zotero user from using Safari, Chrome, or Opera as their main browser and keeping Zotero in full-screen mode in another window. We'd be happy to hear feature requests to reduce some friction for people doing most of their browsing in another application, but, if you're not using Firefox for browsing, Zotero isn't really that different from any app with an embedded web browser (which is most apps these days).

By the way, while we don't have any plans to produce a standalone app, Mozilla does have a standalone app framework called XULRunner, which would support much of the existing Zotero code. But the main difference is that you'd get a Zotero icon instead of a Firefox icon.

I don't have access to Chrome at the moment, but I would be a bit surprised if you couldn't drag the star icon directly into a Firefox window to open the page.

A related feature request that has been made is the ability to automatically run the translator process on a dragged URL, though this has the problem of not knowing whether you're going to get a translator save or a regular Create New Item from Page save, and there could be proxy issues.

In short, any time you open a new window with the url "about:blank?zotero", the plugin opens the zotero pane and makes it full-screen.

In the current dev builds, the special URL zotero://fullscreen will open the Zotero pane in full-screen mode. This URL can be set as the home page or added to the bookmarks toolbar, allowing Shift-click to open a new standalone Zotero window.

This feature will be in 2.0b7.

Another way is to make it Prism compatible.. Mozilla labs has this great plugin that can make a web application a standalone application, for example, you can make it standalone Google Calendar out of it. I think Zotero is a bit different, but it may be worth looking at.

http://prism.mozilla.com/started/

The major confusion here seems to be the erroneous assumption that Zotero is a web application. It is not. Yes, there is a web application component that includes syncing, collaboration, and browsing via the web, but the Zotero software otherwise runs entirely locally.

That said, there are ways to decouple Zotero from the Firefox browser that we are exploring.

I can see at least one good reason for using Zotero as a stand alone app even if one uses FF to browse the Internet, little does it matter that Zotero could be used in full screen view in the near future. Nowadays people use virtual desktops such as Spaces in Mac OS X and/or use multiple screens. The reason for that is the comfort provided by full screen view.

If one wants to browse the Internet, he or she will prefer to see the browser window in full view. He or she then wants to search documents, he or she wants to do that in full screen view and therefore will use a virtual desktop and/or a second screen to keep the documents separate from the other windows

At that point, the user managed to keep his workspace clean and tidy. But then he wants to use the Zotero items he just imported to insert citations in a document.
What does he have to do ?
Go back to FF and open the navigator to browse the item collection.

He can open zotero on top of an already existing window or open a new FF window,
Neither of these two solutions is processor since the user will not be able to see the collection in full screen and, even if he could, he still would have to open a new window and use Firefox if he does not browse the web.

He then wants to insert citation using the Zotero word processor plug-in, he therefore will have to switch back to Firefox to select and edit the citation and then back again to the word processor. That's a bit disturbing.

It would be much more comfortable to use Firefox to search e.g., add items with Zotero as it now is possible, then close FF and use Zotero in full views alongside the word processor and its documents.

Zotero interface is very nice, it is similar to that of iTunes. Do you think that iTunes would be that nice if one had to browse the album collection in the same way as he he now browses the zotero collection with FF ?

Moreover, both Mac OS X and Windows respectively use Safari and Internet Explorer to run. Is this a sufficient reason to run the O.S. through a web browser window ? Would this be a convenient way to interact with the O.S. ? If you answer these questions you will probably find out why having a stand alone Zotero app would be one small step for Zotero development team, a giant leap for Zotero user community.

For those who would like to keep a Firefox window open with full-screen Zotero, a nice feature would be the ability to have links (say, "View Snapshot") open in a new window; Ctrl-click opens in a new tab, but the user would still need to leave full-screen mode to view it.

Such an improvement might obviate the perceived need for "stand-alone" Zotero.

you mean like using shift+click?
Try it out... unfortunately it hasn't obviated those perceived needs ;-).

I think for me the most important remaining thing to make fullscreen even more useful would be to make moving between collections apply across windows, or allow Fullscreen to be limited to a tab:
Say you have 2 FF windows open, one with fullscreen Zotero, one for regular browsing.
Now what I would like to see it that if I used to have one collection "kitchen recipes" selected in my fullscreen, but then decide to do some actual research and select collect "super important stuff" in the fullscreen mode instead, that should change in the other open window, too, so that any imported article lands in the "super important stuff" collection.

I just tried the full-screen mode. It's better than I even imagined since it covers the Firefox window in it's entirety. Nevertheless, one only can open one window at a time which means that one cannot really brows the entirety of its items. It's a bit like conceiving an O,S. or a browser in which the user could only open one window or one folder at a time.

You can have a whole bunch of fullscreen Zotero windows open at t time - I just tried 3 plus an open FF browsing window -
I'm not sure what you'd want that for, but it's actually more than you'd be able to do with a stand-alone application, where separate open windows would mean separate open programs which would likely mess with the DB.

zotero://fullscreen is wonderful-- but is it possible to have homepage in FF that loads a page underneath (i.e. scholar.google.com) while also opening Zotero in fullscreen or normal mode? That way the webpage would be ready if I wanted to do a quick search, but I could still have fullscreen Zotero as my default FF behavior.

Another minor thing; when I have firefox set to have zotero://fulscreen as the homepage, it behaves oddly. Specifically, the vertical resize bar (between zotero & the main firefox panel of the window) is still visible but non-functional. The firefox window title is still "Mozilla Firefox" rather than "Zotero" as it is when it is in fullscreen. Hitting the "toggle full screen" button minimizes the zotero panel to zero height (which is unachievable by manual resizing). Either resizing or hitting "fullscreen" again at this point returns Zotero to regular functionality.

Nothing major, and nothing that really gets in the way of functionality (just requires a couple extra clicks to get Zotero into half-screen mode), but odd and I thought worth mentioning. Unless I'm missing something and it's really supposed to be like that!

Hi following ajlyon's advice I'm adding some comments on what I would like to see in an ideal Zotero stand-alone version. Please take what you like of my comments, as they are based solely on my personal experience with my own set-up

1 - Full page in FF is great, sucks ram & cpu - a standalone could be lighter.
2 - In an ideal world, I would install my standalone and link it to Word/Oo without plugins.
3 - Given the recent problems with Java (I still haven't solved mine) I wish a standalone zotero could work without it.
4 - I really dislike the swapping back and forth the document page and the browser. I wish one day Zotero will sit/pop up somewhere in the tray - gnotero is a good start but of course it only allows to check references (partially). I think it could be possible to extend this concept to a fully editable appelet which integrates with the word processor.

Thanks

Diego

on linux the fullscreen zotero window displays Zotero on the top correctly - so the intention seems to be for this to work as you want.