Mozilla continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be a web browser and recently the company flung open its doors with the The Concept Series, which encourages everyone to share their thoughts about what’s next on the web. Right now Mozilla Labs is featuring a concept called Aurora which envisions web browsing as a transformative 3-D experience.

What would that mean for everyday users? Think MacOS on steroids, or if that doesn’t help, envision clouds of content grouped via timeline that fade into the distance as time passes. History would become a more integrated piece of the browsing experience, but perhaps the most compelling piece in Aurora is the effortless transformation of content presentation.

Take a look in the video of Aurora below, at one point a series of data points contained in a table are instantly morphed into a readable graph, which is then sent live to a remotely connected colleague. The potential for adapting content to meet specific needs almost feels like an evolved form of copying and pasting. Plus, even after copying and pasting current technology can require a fair amount of administrative work to create the right view. In this case it would have meant copying the table into a spreadsheet application like Excel and creating a chart, then e-mailing the chart over to a colleague.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

It’s encouraging to see Mozilla reaching out to the online community to gather revolutionary ideas, and Aurora looks like it has promise. But, some aspects of this particular innovation may create more layers of interactivity than truly necessary, which in essence creates work where there was none before.

For example, the zooming in and out on the Z-axis creates a cool effect, but it can create confusion compared to someone clicking on a button in the Windows task bar.

Still, with powerful search functionality easing the learning curve and a chronological organizational schema most users would gradually master the interface without feeling lost.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:57 pm under Internet, Technology.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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