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."

Shameless Contest Plug

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 [slashdot.org] where people were bated with Alienware swag and developer conference passes to develop extensions & plug-ins for Firefox. The second year saw Shareaholic [mozillalinks.org] come out as a winning plug-in. The third year just finished judging [mozilla.com] 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).

Re:Shameless Contest Plug

...where people were bated with Alienware swag and developer conference passes...

If someone does it to you, it isn't bating.

Like Google Labs.... it has the same last word

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.

Also Like Adobe & Digg Labs...

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 [adobe.com] and Digg Labs [digg.com] that I keep my eye on. (Funny, I don't actually read Digg, I just enjoy seeing how they visualize their data!)

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 ... like that.

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.

Re:Also Like Adobe & Digg Labs...

slashcode.com

Re:Also Like Adobe & Digg Labs...

In Cowboy Neal's mother's basement.

inno

It's nice to see some innovation in software (or in this vaporware stage, at least). desktop software hasn't changed much in the last 10 years. I mean, OS X is a better looky feely version of Windows, and Vista is trying to be OS X. Firefox and Safari are trying to be a better IE. And web 2.0 apps and chat clients are basically better versions of Usenet and IRC.

But there hasn't been anything truly revolutionary in the world of desktop software in a long time.

All in a name

This will no doubt lead to confusion with the Arora webkit browser. http://arora-browser.org/ [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

Re:All in a name

Ask them to change.

Re:OT: Needs screenshots

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/ [blogspot.com]

Not more frames

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?

Organization = disorganization?

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.

Re:Organization = disorganization?

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.

Re:Organization = disorganization?

"New" paradigm? It's been happening for 10 years.

• Google — you could have one central authority organize everything into a single hierarchical structure that's organized very well... or, you can do as good of a guess as possible with lots of help from machines.
• GMail — you could spend lots of man-hours neatly organizing your mail into folders... or, you could just search it.
• Biology [wired.com] — using humans to figure out causation is best, but using machines to find correlation will work for now.

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.

Adaptive Path designed Aurora with Mozilla

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 [slashdot.org]

You might want to check out the Aurora Launch Party [yahoo.com], too, if you're in San Francisco tonight

there is no browser

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:there is no browser

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

Echoing other comments seen around the web...

• Holy crap, look at all that clutter! Icons everywhere!
• Not only that, but none of the icons have text in case someone forgets what one of the thousand icons means.
• What the heck is up with that 3-D mouse? Is Mozilla supposed to invent that?
• Isn't this just a fancier way to copy-paste a link over Skype and initiate a voice chat with them?
• This can't possibly just be a Mozilla project. You'd need a whole new OS!
• Radial menus may work sometimes, but four unlabeled cloverleaves with 5 tiny unlabeled dots that don't reveal their function unless you hover over them?
• The only worthwhile thing there is turning numbers into graphs. So Mozilla just needs to merge with OpenOffice or something.

who's the target audience?

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'm not falling for this again!

I'll bet the Aurora Browser *is* Windows Vista.

Uhh oh...

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...

Re:Another browser?

How many more web browsers do we need?

um about 3 +/- the sq rt of a loaf of bread

Re:The future of Firefox is MSIE?

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.

Re:Sombody please tag this story!

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...

Re:I for one... welcome our new Itunes overloads

Can't you just use emacs for that?