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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."
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.
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?
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.