Mozilla Labs Announce New Project, Want the Community to Design the Future Browser
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After launching Weave 0.2, the synchronization plugin that enables data to be synchronized across multiple computers for Mozila’s Popular web browser Firefox, Mozilla Labs have now announced a new project where it wants us users to participate and contribute towards their goal of designing a next generation web-browser.
After the huge success of the Firefox Download Day, it seems the Mozilla Foundation is looking for the same amount of contribution from the FireFox Community. To be a part of the project, the Mozilla teams wants to know your views about how you would want the next generation browser to be. The project wants users to share their views, ideas, concepts, mockups and demos for their future browser. Mozilla hopes that the project will “inspire future design directions for FireFox, the Mozilla project and the web as a whole”
According to the blog post, the project team is particularly looking for User Interface (UI) and graphic designers and their mockups, although they are open to any kind of participation and input that they can get.
Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.
Ideas
- It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
Mockups
- Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
Prototypes
- A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.
To hep us get started, or maybe to give us an example of the type inputs they are looking for, three videos have been posted on the blog.
The first video, showcases a concept named ‘Aurora’ and offers a look at a possible way in which a browser be made to handle the content that it brings to the user and how the same can be made so much more interactive. Adaptive Path, the design firm behind the video has been co-founded by Jesse James Garett (well know for Ajax) and was responsible for the re-design and facelift of MySpace recently.
The video gives a nice insight on how the browser can take interactiveness to a whole new level. The other two videos take a peak into ‘Mobile’ concepts and a different approach to history and bookmarking.
Personally, I like how Jesse James Garett takes the 3D approach towards managing things as ‘objects’. It is an interesting concept to use the Z-axis (the axis that leads away from the user) as the axis for time and then base each object’s relativity on the timeline according to its usage history. The older the object, the farther it is from the user and a closer object means that it was recently used. The concept also makes use of clusters in the 3D space which groups together related objects, so it becomes easy to navigate.
It is not certain whether the concepts, ideas or mockups will make it into a finished product or not. But it is almost certain that they will enhance the exchange of ideas, thoughts and views and enable more contribution for the Firefox community.
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