[pcpro] Mozilla, concept browser: Aurora - Overclock.net

yawnbox · 08-07-08

Mozilla reveals the Firefox of the future?
source: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/216897/m...he-future.html

Quote:

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.

Data gathered from the web - such as weather reports - are collated as 'objects' that can be dragged and dropped on to the desktop and dynamically manipulated. The video shows two people working in different offices comparing rain reports. In the demonstration Alan invites Jill to join him on a weather report page, where they each highlight important bits of the page for each other.

The video then shows Jill entering a 3D visual bookmarking system in which related pages are grouped by cells, modelled after cells in the human body. Recently opened pages appear closer to the screen, and gradually fall back the longer they're ignored.

The author searches through sports, entertainment and weather cells, as well as those of her contacts, before pulling up the page she wants and dragging it onto the existing page, where it automatically overlaps comparing the two data sets.

Potentially the most interesting thing about the video is how integrated everything appears, with desktop tasks and an instant messaging utility all linked directly into the browser interface.

Mozilla Labs

Aurora 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.

Unlike Google Labs, however, Mozilla intends for the labs to encourage ideas from beyond the typical open-source development community.

"We're particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects," says the site. "And we're biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations."

"Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the web as a whole."

from Mozilla:
http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/aurora.html

Quote:

The Other Story

The desktop of the future will be an Information Management Shell --- the central place for dealing with information.

If you look around your desktop, there are many sets of "information organization structures" --- collections of taxonomies or webs of information.
Examples include:

1. Local hard drive file directory structures.
2. Site Maps or table of contents of web sites.
3. Taxonomies such as Yahoo! or Open Directory
4. Search Indices
5. Bookmarks
6. FTP
7. History
8. Mailbox hierarchies

Each of these lives an independent life. They each have their own storage, own viewers and editors ...

There is clearly a lot of wasted effort. It is actually much worse than just wasted effort. Its organization of information based on the protocol used to access it, not based on what its about or where the user wants to put it. This balkanization is at the root of many of our information problems.

Aurora is an attempt at solving some of these problems. In particular, it provides a way of navigating all of the above sources of data. Furthermore it allows you to integrate all of them. E.g., you can create a workspace called Sailing under which you have some local file system folders, portions of Yahoo!, Excite, Open Directory or some live search queries, ... So, its a lot more than simply slapping a common UI over multiple distinct sources of data.

Aurora also makes it very easy to manifest new data sources into Aurora without any changes to the UI code. The UI widget only needs to have the notion of an RDF 'data source'. Everything, right from the structure of the tree, the columns that should be presented, the menu commands for each item, ... comes from the RDF graph. We hope to make all aspects of Aurora both scriptable and declaratively specifiable.

Please do not judge Aurora by what it is today. It is very much work in progress. We hope you will help us make it better.

from Mozilla Labs:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/intr...participation/

Aurora (Part 1)
http://www.vimeo.com/1450211?pg=embed&sec=1450211

Bookmarking and History Concept Video
http://www.vimeo.com/1466664?pg=embed&sec=1466664

Firefox Mobile Concept Video
http://www.vimeo.com/1152218?pg=embed&sec=1152218

VCheeZ · 08-07-08

Wao. I want to beta it sooooo bad.

Furai · 08-07-08

Very interesting. I'd like to give it a shot. Wonder how much CPU and RAM that would eat up...

VCheeZ · 08-07-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Furai

Very interesting. I'd like to give it a shot. Wonder how much CPU and RAM that would eat up...

I would upgrade if I needed to to use a browser of that caliber...fo sho!

onlycodered · 08-07-08

Way too cluttered and confusing. Plus, who wants to use their browser fullscreen?

XaNe · 08-07-08

nahhh i just want a light weight non flashy browser that is fast and rock solid stable.

SUPER PISSED · 08-08-08

Cool. Web browsers have been pretty much the same forever, change is good. Quite the learning curve though.

Dethredic · 08-08-08

Personally I think that is wayyyy to complicated for our current generation and our lack of computer intelligence.

I do like the idea though, and hopefully this is just a step to something even bigger.

kanman · 08-09-08

very nice but waaay too messy, I'd lose my mind if my stuff were "clustered" like that, good old rows and colums for me plz

0xygen · 08-09-08

Man they are surpassing any other browser.

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[pcpro] Mozilla, concept browser: Aurora

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