Mozilla’s Aurora Shows Concepts for Future Browsers
Like cars, buildings and airplanes, browsers can have concept models. That’s the idea behind Aurora, a new “concept browser” from the Mozilla Foundation.
Emanating from the Mozilla Labs initiative, where users are encouraged to offer new browser ideas, the concept is available in video visualizations. In the videos, Aurora envisions a variety of new interaction models that push the concepts of collaboration, real-world interaction, and context.
Data as User Objects
For instance, weather data can be collected as a user-controllable object, dropped onto a screen where it displays a graph, and then dragged to a desktop. The basic thrust of this video is that two people are finding, exchanging and examining data as they might do with physical materials.
Another clip demonstrates a futuristic bookmark system. Folders of bookmarks are represented by small page images in a row at the top of the page, and all the bookmarks within that folder descend in a column of small images when you click on the folder. Typing in a word allows the browser to suggest some related bookmarks. When you bookmark a page, the browser suggests the appropriate folder.
But the browser also has the intelligence to find a page according to its work-flow context, so the user can type the day and time, and the browser will find the page the user was on at that moment.
For mobile browsers, the idea is to more fully utilize zoomable space. For instance, panning with your finger on a touch screen can go to the edge of the browser. The entire screen is taken up with content, but by panning over, the user can see browser controls that might otherwise be hidden. This maximizes screen space for content.
The plus sign calls up a new tab. When you zoom out, you can see all browser tabbed windows as separate miniature screens, which can then be stacked and reorganized as if they were open documents.
‘Predict the Future’
The Aurora videos were created by Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based user experience consultancy. Mozilla said more videos will be released that “predict the future” of browsers.
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path said that in considering Aurora, the team kept coming back to a core set of “essential, high-priority elements.” The elements, he said, were clustered around four major themes — context awareness, in which the browser “pays attention” to the many kinds of data that pass through it; natural interaction that more closely resembles the real world than current interfaces; continuity that provides the same interaction model regardless of device; and multiuser applications, which opens up the browser to the Web’s community space.
Al Hilwa, program director at industry research firm IDC, noted that the “browser had been a sleeper market for some years,” with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the main player. But now, he noted, there is renewed interest in the browser as a platform because of the rise of rich Internet applications that can work on the desktop, the rise of non-Microsoft-based mobile platforms, and the resurgence of Apple’s Mac.