Mozilla Calls for a Next-Gen Browser: What's it Look Like?

by Sam Dean - Aug. 07, 2008Comments (2)

Mozilla is reaching out to users to design a next-generation Internet browser.Â It has made available a video, called Aurora and created by Adaptive Path, showing how the new browser it has in mind might work for web collaboration. It's quite an interesting video to watch, and you can see it in high definition here.Â Â What are Mozilla's specific plans with this project?

According to Mozilla: "Today weâ€™re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web. You donâ€™t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you donâ€™t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate.â€

The call for participation is found here. You can also find information on design themes here, and a FAQ.

The Aurora video shows new ideas on how web users might collaborate in the future. In the video, a user is shown looking at web pages while photos and names of friends or colleagues are shown on screen at the same time. Users collaborating can drag hand-like cursors around to show each other things on the web, and can navigate Mac-like docks with icons for various types of information they may share. Here are a few screens to give you a feel for the video:

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Here, a user named Jill is looking at a web page and pinging someone named Alan, whose face and name are shown on the screen in the browser, and with whom she can send IM-like messages.

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Jill and Alan get into a discussion about the weather and choose to go to a web page full of weather data and look at it together. Here, Jill is highlighting a section of the weather data and dragging Alan's avatar-like presence on her screen over to drop it on the part of the screen that she wants to show up in his browser.

In the shot at left, Jill is cycling through a dock in her browser that works and looks very much like the Dock in Mac OS X. She can stop at depictions of people she knows to ping them, or she can stop at favorite sites, using the dock like a Firefox user uses bookmarks, and more.

I definitely recommend watching the video. This sounds like an interesting project from Mozilla, and, in my opinion, there is not enough browser innovation going on. We should be seeing browsers coming out that are customized for specific tasks, and browsers based on brand new ideas. I like the open source work that Webkit is doing in this area as well.

For more on Aurora and on Snowl, another new initiative from Mozilla focused on messaging, see Matt Asay's post. TechCrunch also got the scoop on Aurora, here.