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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."
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.
Ugh. I really hope they figure out threading. Right now web2.0 is like windows3.11 level multitasking-- One site or plugin starts to eat all of your resources and until you manage to close it or it fixes itself you can't use any of your other (web)apps.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
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?
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.
Ask them to change.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Looks like a tornado touched down and sent all the guys bookmarks spiraling into a huge disorganized mess. Overwhelmingly craptastic is how I would describe it. I really find this push on all sides to transform my computer from a deterministic machine to a non-deterministic one rather disturbing. I think these are the sorts of tools that, used habitually, will make a person intellectually pliable and mentally deficient. Sabotage the persons capacity to organize their shit, teach them to fuzzy search everything and accept what they receive, throw some corporate propaganda in there to make a few bucks on the side. No one really knows what the computer is going to spit out this time, so they'll accept it. Brawndo, it's got what plants crave...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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;
To Firefox just being simple, stable and safe? Why get fancy and go down the IE route?
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.
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."
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!
> 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
Opera already has voice recognition.
Internet Explorer: Where do you want to go today?
Firefox: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
Opera: Are you guys coming or what?
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.