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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.
"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.
How many more web browsers do we need?
um about 3 +/- the sq rt of a loaf of bread
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.
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
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?
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.
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;
hi, it's 1985 calling. ever heard of this?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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."
Yup, been working a little bit on a page with lots of screenshots. For right now you can find some on the blog: http://arorabrowser.blogspot.com/
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.