Mozilla Unveils Aurora Concept Browser 213
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."
Nothing is wasted! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Ugly, confusing, hyped. (Score:1, Insightful)
A million little screens floating around? Yeah, call me when that works out.
Re:The future of Firefox is MSIE? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Organization = disorganization? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
there is no browser (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:I for one... welcome our new Itunes overloads (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:All in a name (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask them to change.
Re:Sombody please tag this story! (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrible UI (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:there is no browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, software development is not just code, there's also requirements gathering and design, among others. I'm not saying Adaptive Path didn't jump the gun, but the coding part is easy enough with excellent developers, design, and communication.
Not especially well-received by the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
What ever happened? (Score:1, Insightful)
To Firefox just being simple, stable and safe? Why get fancy and go down the IE route?
Re:Organization = disorganization? (Score:4, Insightful)
who's the target audience? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Uhh oh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Advertisement not article (Score:1, Insightful)
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!
Re:Organization = disorganization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
It's marginally easier to put many tags on one file as opposed to creating one file and then all the shortcuts you want in different folders as they apply. People just don't understand shortcuts. At one job, we had a big bunch of marketing cruft in a folder, 30gb of videos, pictures, etc. So and so would want that stuff in their personal folder and sure enough, they'd copy and paste. Management refused to let us set size limits on folders and so it would be a constant cycle of losing drive space, looking for the new offender, explaining how shortcuts work, making shortcuts for them, then watching some other idiot make the same mistake, then going back to the first idiot who forgot everything you told them making the mistake all over again. And any time we tried to put restrictions on things management would order them removed.
I'm of the opinion that if you can't let someone do something bad, then you won't end up being angry they did it. If people demonstrate they won't listen to instructions like "stay away from the angry bear" and management refuses to let you put the bear in a cage, you shouldn't be responsible for maulings. Doesn't work that way, though.
Re:I for one... welcome our new Itunes overloads (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Organization = disorganization? (Score:3, Insightful)
The purpose of a computer is to do busy computational work. That is, a computer can't create a weather model, but it can read data from sensors, plug the numbers into the human-created model, and then spit out an answer. In effect, computers are there to automate and simplify hard tasks, and eliminate menial ones.
Organization is one of the last frontiers of automation, if not the last frontier. For the most part, everybody has a "system" of organization. There are rules to this system that are by and large strictly followed. The rules vary between people, but organization cannot happen without the rules.
In the past, what is required of the user is to set up the organization structure, and then set up the rules. Then the computer will take input, and spit it out in the organized form based on the rules.
The future is to automatically create the rules based on the user's behavior. That's what a lot of these new "paradigms" are aiming for. This eliminates the step where the user explicitly defines the rules. In fact, they're going on step further, and trying to elimiate the initial structure setup, so that the computer can infer the structure based on the user's behavior. The combination results in looser rules, but also a more dynamic structure.
But honestly, it doesn't look like anybody's gotten past the "throw everything on the floor" step of organizing yet.