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Mozilla Unveils Aurora Concept Browser
Barence writes "Mozilla has unveiled a spectacular new concept browser, dubbed Aurora. The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future. The Aurora browser demonstration shows a highly advanced way of collaborating data gathered on the web, and represents a spectacular introduction to the new Mozilla Labs, which much like Google Labs looks to become a home for offbeat projects which would otherwise probably never see the light of day. More details, and a video demonstration, are on the Mozilla Labs site."
This seems like a rather old project. Am I wrong? http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/aurora.html
I want my Cowboyneal
The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future.
Labs is more than that. Back in ought six, Slashdot covered their first extend Firefox contest where people were bated with Alienware swag and developer conference passes to develop extensions & plug-ins for Firefox. The second year saw Shareaholic come out as a winning plug-in. The third year just finished judging and I'm excited to see what Mozilla finds as the best Firefox 3 add ons.
It's nice to see a foundation aiding, encouraging and rewarding the average developer off the street for their work. Even better than that is when Mozilla backs a plug-in or add-on it's usually solid and reliable (unlike the many WinAmp plug-ins that plagued my college machine).
My work here is dung.
Unless it supports all the latest ECMAscript, DOM and CSS specifications (including HTML 5 media) then it's far from being bleeding-edge.
Highly advanced!
It's the web OS, plain and simple.
It's good but it relies on web services a lot. But that's what a browser is for. Dear Mozilla developers, focus on Enterprise level as well. Though it is open source and all, it would be great to be able to configure Aurora to manage private services.
The question that comes to mind is - will it be like the Aurora class ships in Stargate Atlantis? meaning - what are the security features (better shields?)? What are the requirements? (Will it be ZPM-like requirements?)
The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).
Saying its like Google Labs is like saying Saks Fifth Avenue is like Madison Avenue because they both have the word Avenue.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
But there hasn't been anything truly revolutionary in the world of desktop software in a long time.
"Spectacular".
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Though Aurora may never see the light of day, the ideas brought forth may find themselves in future iteration of the browser, and even the web.
At the very least, open-source innovations like those provide previous art when a troll patents the very same idea years later.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
A million little screens floating around? Yeah, call me when that works out.
How many more web browsers do we need?
Potentially the most interesting thing about the video is how integrated everything appears, with desktop tasks and an instant messaging utility all linked directly into the browser interface.
Yeahhh.. didn't they already sue Microsoft for this?
Browser of the future? No on my computer. This will be used by all the folks who insist that eye movement and voice recognician will be the interface of the future. These "future" browser "features" are not what I'm looking for in my browser.
The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).
As long as we're talking about labs, there's also Adobe Labs and Digg Labs that I keep my eye on. (Funny, I don't actually read Digg, I just enjoy seeing how they visualize their data!)
... like that.
While you're right that these sites aren't open to the public, I think it's mostly due to the nightmare of trying to credit people with ideas when you're making billions off these ideas months later. The community might not
I will point out that the 'labs' concept just seems to be an indication of how these entities see future development. A similarity between Google and Mozilla is that they offer tons of developer resources on their labs sites. I don't think those two are so different from each other.
Instead of looking at these Labs as inferior, I rather give the companies a chance to show me what they think is bleeding edge and a lot of the time it's a good indicator of innovation. However you look at it, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the labs so you know what your competitor/partner is up to and get a glimpse of the future as they see it.
My work here is dung.
This will no doubt lead to confusion with the Arora webkit browser. http://arora-browser.org/ Sigh... I spent a good chunk of time finding the name and making sure there wasn't any conflicts out there. And then comes along not only a software application, but a browser... :( Should I change my name or ask them to change theirs?
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
This looks interesting and it is good that they are thinking about the future of browsing. I liked the ease with which you could manipulate and share data, though I imagine that something that is designed to be that open would introduce some interesting security issues.
I am definitely not a fan of the pop-up frames as you move the mouse to the edge of the window - it is one of the things I don't like about Sugar OS on my XO/OLPC laptop. I don't know if others have had similar problems, but I found them way too easy to trigger and very distracting when you were in the middle of doing something else.
Also, I am not sure how practical the bookmarks/history view is for large amounts of data. It looks like they are taking a leaf out of iTunes' album view. I still use bookmarks instead of tags (not sure if that makes me a dinosaur or not) and I have a helluva lot of them. A visual representation of them versus the existing menu structure would make it much harder to find what I am looking for. It is down to my personal preferences admittedly, but if the end goal is to make information easier to find, I don't think it works.
Oh, and did anyone else get reminded of the D&D computer games with the radial menus when watching the demo?
What is with this new desktop "paradigm" I keep seeing everywhere from this new browser to the new multi-touch displays? Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper for a clean set of underwear. Call me old fashioned but I like hierarchical data and tree structures.
I understand it's just a concept, but seeing this type of thing everywhere has me wonder who exactly is doing usability and what they are smoking because I want some.
Setting aside the gushing tone of the submitter's post, Aurora is Adaptive Path's first open source design project and collaboration with Mozilla -- it's not all Mozilla.
Adaptive Path team designers and members discuss the design process extensively and in detail on their blog. More details in the Firehose
You might want to check out the Aurora Launch Party, too, if you're in San Francisco tonight
This is just the release of part 1 of a 4 part series showing a mock-up of what a future browser might look like. There is no code, there is no browser, this is vapor-ware at its finest. Additional Adaptive Path, the people who made the video, are throwing a party to celebrate their release of the video.
When did software development turn into movie producing?
I can't VTFV because I'm at work (ha), but from the screenshots Aurora looks like it could do for the web what the 'lowfat' project could do for digital photo albums.
His webpage isn't very up-to-date, but you can find a Youtube video of the 'lowfat' software here.
It actually does not require XGL, I'm not sure why those Youtube videos seem to think that it does.
The actual webpage for the project is here. It's not too hard to get up and running if you're using a semi-recent version of GNU/Linux. :-)
A quick scan of TFA doesn't reveal the heritage of Aurora, but the emphasis on web publishng vs viewing, and even the name, both immediately bring to mind the (ancient, but continuously updated) W3C editor/browser Amaya:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
In that the release date is the same day as duke nukem for(n)ever?
I record my sleeptalking
What do you want for podcast support?
When I click on a podcast in Firefox, either it plays through the site's player, or the mp3 downloads and plays in my computer's media player.
What is missing here?
As for handling library functions of my media, I leave that to my media player. I'm not sure I need Firefox to handle that.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
There's already a QTWebKit based browser called arora. I propose firesomething.
please fix memory leak in 3.0 first kthxbye.
Yes but its not automatic.
You dont come to your computer and have the podcast already downloaded because of FF.
And these days a podcast maybe a TV show.
Wordle of TFA.
We released our own research-oriented web browser:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/suprabrowser
It is designed to run in a VM where the individual stores all of their private data on their own server. It supports persistent, threaded instant messaging, bookmarks, RSS, file management, contact management, threaded discussions, web page highlighting, email, mailing lists, and more.
If it sounds like too much, you can use whatever parts you want. All network traffic is encrypted using 3DES after a zero knowledge based authentication.
For better or worse, it is certainly one of the most innovative products in the computer industry, open source or not, but that means that it takes a bit more marketing to get people interested. It's a fairly different concept as far as information management is concerned, but definitely a necessary one.
That radial menu tells me these people know nothing about good UI design. It appears to work precisely the same way as a contextual menu, except that you can't see what any of the options are until you mouseover the button, which reveals an icon (possibly with a label, I couldn't tell from the low-res video). The way the option buttons are arranged around the circle, the chances of memorizing precisely which button performs what task are minimal, since it's difficult to distinguish between a button at 7:00 and a button at 8:00 (when the number of buttons is not constant, as it is on a clock face, which is why I can tell the difference between 7:00 and 8:00 there).
Compare this to the standard contextual menu. You can see all the menu options at once (unless there are too many to fit on the screen and they scroll), they all have a text label, they could have an icon as well (they usually don't, but certainly should if the concept can be represented in icon form), and the interface is already familiar to nearly everyone.
I mentioned scrolling when there are too many options in the menu. Imagine the radial menu interface with that many options on it. Imagine how long it would take to hunt through them one at a time to find the one you're looking for.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
... no wait, it wasn't - I was thinking about something else *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
So Firefox should be iTunes and handle media subscriptions, download media, and handle media library functions?
How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?
Let's say I want to listen to Bill Simmon's BS Report from ESPN. The link the podcast is always different. How will the browser just know to find the link, even if I tell it I always want the BS Report?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The name Aurora was used internally in 96-97 to describe the "push technology" elements of the Netscape 5 browser (code named Constellation). Neither technology shipped. Interesting that Mozilla chooses a name like that considering the history.
Will it run on Midori?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
As I under stand it, bleeding edge means new but not too new. So bleeding edge is firefox 3 not Aurora. So the correct analogy here is cutting edge or leading edge.
Jeez, you sound like a complete moron when you get it wrong.
Now, make like a tree and get out of here!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To Firefox just being simple, stable and safe? Why get fancy and go down the IE route?
Random off topic thought. You need screen shots on the Arora project page.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
Every time one of these new, far-reaching concept videos comes out, I can't help but wonder whether it'll be covered on the Paleo-Future blog in a decade. It's hard not to be pessimistic, considering all the cool concept videos covered in their graveyard.
With their increased productivity, I guess Luke can transmit his application to the Academy this year after all!
That, and the kitchen sink.
Maybe Songbird is what you want, although it's not ready yet.
I can't figure out who this is supposed to be for.
My parents and family would be thoroughly confused by it, as would likely be most other "normal" users.
As a power users, I'm not sure this helps me either. I don't want icons "drifting away" from me, and it doesn't seem to make anything I do any faster.
This is a UNIX system. I know this!
over a train, which I could also easily afford? Seriously, I'm just not sure what this will be worth, but oh well, maybe they'll figure something out.
I'll bet the Aurora Browser *is* Windows Vista.
I'm hoping that I can tread the line between being appreciative of the creative work that has obviously gone into this, and trying to keep my feet on the ground. I've worked in a lot of software companies that have tried to "design" the "next great thing", and to put it bluntly, I see a lot of that in these videos.
When you go to the Mozilla Labs site, you are informed that these are concepts; ideas that they want to flesh out. But what I think is missing (even to the designers) is the question of how it will actually work. It's blue sky thinking with all the inconvenient "it's impossible" tasks shoved down to the hapless "engineer" who tries to build it.
Seemingly simple things like taking a random table in a web page and building a meaningful line graph out of it turns out to be extremely hard in the general case. I speak from experience here, having been paid lots of money to do it several times before :-) (despite my protestations of impossibility). Random data in webpages (or other documents) are just not structured well enough to do it -- and it turns out that partial success (i.e., it works "most of the time") is mostly useless.
The car industry has a long tradition of building concept cars. These are cars that are not meant to be sold. They are only ideas that might fire the imagination for future designers. But the difference between concept cars and these software concepts (not just Mozilla Labs, but many large companies that I could name) is that concept cars *are actually cars*. You can drive them. These concepts are like pictures of concept cars -- or animated movies of concept cars. It's like saying, "My concept car is the one in Speed Racer".
Like I said, the ideas are interesting. But I'd really prefer it if the industry would build working software as a concept. One extremely good example of what I'd like to see is Englightenment. It often sucked (especially if you read the code in the early days). But the concepts were *magnificent*. And they were demonstrably *possible*.
A person writing a window manager could look at Enlightenment and say, "That's sooo cool, but I need it to be a bit more conservative in some ways" and write something that fit the bill. Looking at these concepts, all I can say is, "I'm glad I don't have to write it".
I can just see it now. The girlfriend (replace with "mom" for the typical slashdot user) sits down at the computer and opens up Aurora. All of a sudden she's swept with a tornado of porn, bizarro internet videos, bookmarked pictures of her hot friends on myspace, etc. Thought that changing the name of those bookmarks to "email" and "lolcatz" was enough security? Not any more, buddy...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I'd just be happy if firefox 3 would run on my trusty, stable Mandrake 10.2 box. It's the only piece of software I've installed that will not run due to dependence on newer pango/cairo things. Gosh, even the latest pidgin compiles fine on this system.
Oh well. At least 2.0 is still good for awhile.
I think you might find it's the other way round - cutting edge is new technology, bleeding edge is so new it's likely to hurt you.
LOL. Could the poster of this article sound mored biased? Talk about fan boy.
This exact same software could be from Microsoft and still be open source and I guarantee slashdot would be talking about how lame and doomed it is. Mozilla guys making millions is okay as long as you come off as being cool I guess? Who can keep up anymore. Gimme them troll points!
I remember seeing canned demos like this at least 10 years ago. This really reminds me of the one Apple did.
There's no working code behind those videos, just slideshows.
Some people learn and process information visually, conceptualize in images, learn best when they have the big picture and can drill down to the details. Visual spatial learners comprise about a third of the population.
The other two thirds are the verbal sequentials. They are primarily aural - verbal and learn from the bottom up, step by concrete step. Education is overwhelmingly taught in a verbal sequential style.
The parent is the second I have seen so far that has a very negative opinion about the proposed interface. The earlier poster even seems to feel that it might damage an individuals ability to reason, and that may be true, for verbal sequentials.
The Aurora interface looks like it was tailor made for visual spatial people. It doesn't surprise me that a verbal sequential would feel threatened by this interface. But as verbal sequentials are in the majority, I'm sure they will always have a number of suitable browser to choose from.
A Google search will provide many links to visual spatial information.
Already I long for the days when web pages were text based, and I could simply read information there, interact with others on newsgroups and forums, irc, etc., without all the bleeping, blinking. spinning, noise-making bells and whistles. It made sense then. The more flashy and glitzy the Web gets, the less I like it. We wonder why, now, something like 80% of school age children are diagnosed with ADHD. If something isn't spinning, dancing, singing a song, flashing, and beeping, they just don't get it...Well, I'm the other way...All the beeping and flashing gives me headaches and nausea. Then again, I'm one of those dated fogies (at the ripe age of 39) that actually likes to read books made of real paper, too. And, I like hierarchical directory structures, too. Those make sense. Order makes sense. It ain't broke, folks...let's stop fixing it, please.
-- tonybaldwin.me
The 3D mouse is featured in this video. It looks sort of like a robotic arm. To use it, you have to hold your arm forward without resting it on the table top. I don't see how you could use it for extended periods.
> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?
Firefox already understands RSS feeds. Podcasts are RSS feeds with a <media> element. All Firefox has to do is queue up all files mentioned in the media element using its download manager, and provide a bit of UI to manage/play the media.
That said, just because Firefox *can* do this doesn't mean it *should*. To do this properly and not in a half-assed way, Firefox would have to essentially turn into Songbird (or iTunes) and bundle its own codecs etc. And that'd just bloat the browser.
As long as Firefox depends on third party apps to play the media, this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
Go somewhere random
Am I the only one who couldn't help but notice the image of Stan Marsh jacking off in front of a computer that was on that lady's desktop?
Why not both?
I sort of agree. It's pretty obvious to me what the next gen browsers ought to be based on, and that is RSS. The browser should be based on RSS, with smart feeds (like Apple's smart folders applied to feeds) and smarter search. NetNewsWire sort of does this, but the browser side of the app is lacking. Safari treats RSS the way I like, but doesn't allow for smart feeds. I can see many people wanting better social networking features as well.
Firefox has become for me what I tried to get away from when I first started using it (when it was Phoenix). I want a simple UI like Safari's, not some mass of buttons like IE.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Mozilla, once a world of anti-corporate geeks, can only speak corporate-marketing-speak now. Have you seen Planet Mozilla lately? Where once there was lively open, even acrimonious, debate, now there is only harmonious agreement and talking points -- like sheep, all the bloggers repeat the talking points, and with that same fake corporate enthusiasm that causes Steve Ballmer to jump around the stage. What's the point of blogs? Just post the talking points once and save the bandwidth.
Allow me to excerpt from the /. post above about the new browser:
I can't wait!
Sounds like what you want is Songbird,which,hey what do ya know,it's built from Firefox. And if you want social browsing you have Flock,which,hey what do ya know again,is ALSO built on Firefox. If Mozilla wants to know where the "Firefox killer" is coming from,just look in the mirror. Somebody will take the FF code,add their own killer features and there you go. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...whose hardware requirements were so high, they brought computers that could run Crysis with all options on high to a halt.
Well it sure looks like the disorganized mess most people seem to like as desktop.
It seems like Mozilla is almost wholly focused on browser tech.
While I realize that webmail is supplanting a lot of thick clients, and that Outlook will be the corporate norm so long as exchange is the norm, it would be a shame if Thunderbird development was allowed to languish.
Are there any other open source mail clients out there that are picking up speed?
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
It looks like:
1) A mess
2) Three OS X docks
3) Dashboard / Yahoo widgets
But with all the aesthetic sense and usability of an Open Source project.
It was basically copy+pasting, except instead of 2 seconds it took 5 minutes.
... It's unbecoming. Just one "spectular" would have been enough.
WebGuyCS
Looks like you would enjoy watching videos only in ascii text.
We can still have our command line where it's required. For everything else, get on with the show.
You can watch the high-res version on Vimeo:
http://www.vimeo.com/1450211?pg=embed&sec=1450211&hd=1
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
"Mozilla has unveiled a spectacular new concept browser, dubbed Aurora. The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future. The Aurora browser demonstration shows a highly advanced way of collaborating data gathered on the web, and represents a spectacular introduction to the new Mozilla Labs, which much like Google Labs looks to become a home for offbeat projects which would otherwise probably never see the light of day. More details, and a video demonstration, are on the Mozilla Labs site."
Is this a Slashvertisement or what? You can tell that a piece was written by a PR department when, despite all the LOUD and OBNOXIOUS adjectives, it barely describes the thing it is hyping.
> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?
http://inforss.mozdev.org/index.html
Bullish Machine Tzar
Is it just me, or do the non-parallel sides of the test tube image on Mozilla's page make it look like a big blue prophylactic device?
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-the-concept-series-call-for-participation/
The mouse cursor should resemble a magnifying glass -- that's just what I use to look for something on my cluttered desk.
this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
Eurgh god no. Extensions are an awful 1980s idea that somehow have managed to stick around. My computer is able to react based on the type of the content and I can override that if needs be. But don't force yet another extension onto us!
Look out!