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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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Order? Structure? Hierarchy? How quaint! Don't you realize that no one has any time for that anymore. The new paradigm for the future is EXACTLY to toss everything on the floor and let the glorious God SEARCH order it for you.
The new usability is all about easing the life of the content creator, and letting the computer sort things out. Creating order is boring and hard. The content user is responsible for leveraging SEARCH to find what it needs. Oh, maybe you can throw a category tag on something if you really need to find it again quickly.
This is the whole GMail vs. Outlook argument that I see over and over again. Trees and hierarchy are soooooo old fashioned. This is just a visual extension of the death of the hierarchical structure in our lives.
When you find yourself spending your whole day organizing data into trees, but the amount of data is constantly growing, you begin to realize that it's not useful to perfectly organize everything anymore.
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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 think it really shows that there really are different kinds of users out there. There's those like us who prefer a cleaner desktop and some sense of organization, perhaps sometimes almost to the point of OCD (i can't stand having a filled trash bin for instance).
However a lot of the people I interact with, some are technical type users, others aren't so much, who have their desktops littered with icons almost filling the entire wallpaper. Granted I can understand that sometimes even in chaos there is some semblance of organization because these people know that when they're looking for a particular thing on their desktop they know its always going to be generally in the same place each time.
My only concern with this new stuff is whether or not they'll make it just as easy to clean stuff up and organize it as they did to make it all cluttered up.
I honestly thought this article was regarding the Arora browser based on WebKit.
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.
Did you notice the 3D 'mouse' she was using. can you imagine having to hold your arm above your desk for hours a day.
I can google something (or delicious or whatever) and copy the link into an IM window WAY faster than that person was working.
The only cool thing in that video was the automatic transformation of data. That idea might come to fruition... it would be fairly easy to create an markup language for data and have a plugin that could re-render on the client side.
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