Mozilla's Future Of The Browser Project

My pal, Jamais Cascio, asked me to drop in on a series of meetings earlier in the year, something to do with Mozilla and the future of the browser. I was able to work with Jamais again -- we met in some of the earliest work with the Open University's Social:Learn project -- as well as getting the opportunity to work with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path for the first time. The workshop also involved a bunch of other brilliant and interesting people (see below):

Jesse recently unveiled the Aurora user interface concept (which I have yet to comment on), which was a direct outgrowth of the project, and has posted Jamais' forecasting scenarios, as well:

[from Aurora: Forecasting the Future.

Jamais called on a whole lot of smart people and led them (and a bunch more from both Adaptive Path and Mozilla) through a two-day workshop to forecast one possible future for browsers and the Web. Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:

• Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
• Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
• Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.

Based on these trends, Jamais wrote three scenarios fleshing out the details of how these trends might come into being, and how they would manifest in people’s everyday lives. We wanted to use these forecasting scenarios to explore several aspects of this possible future world that we knew would never end up in our movie, but would provide us with some context for the design choices we’d be making.

Download:
Forecasting Scenarios

Forecasting Workshop Contributors:
Mike Beltzner
Rebecca Blood
Stowe Boyd
Leah Buley
Dawn Danby
Alex Faaborg
Henning Fischer
Jesse James Garrett
Dan Harrelson
Sebastian Heycke
Julia Houck-Whitaker
Mike Liebhold
Jessica Margolin
Peter Merholz
Lisa Rein

PS I am responsible for the "Terminator Goggles" in Jamais scenarios, and was the most strident advocate of the position that the 'browser' will cease to exist, as we know it, and instead, we will switch to a multiplicity of tools that interact with the Web in very specific and different ways than the all-purpose swiss army knife approach that we take for granted today.

Comments

[gregorylent]

notice how much attention is required with the three adaptive path scenarios. that lets me know they don't get it. they draw a straight line from here to the future, even though they claim otherwise.

the future is not more, better stuff ... it is less. less intrusive, less demanding, less noticeable, in fact, much less necessary. you don't know you need it because it is already doing its job.

aurora is interesting, but most of what is in the demo is also more, better, finer-grained, but from the same state of consciousness as exists now. and that is not going to be how it is.

they also have no understanding that augmented reality is chasing infinity, example the human genome project was going to get to the bottom of the gene. ha, it just found more layers. the onion is infinite.

most data, like most thoughts and words, is beside the point, useless. and highly-catalogued uselessness is still useless.... meaning that heretofore uncovered correlations are still only approximations ... it will be made sense of by mind and intuition, as always. if the consciousness is unified, then more sense can be discerned. it doesn't work in the other direction.

virtual identity? this is already a virtual identity, the mind and senses, and self-concept. more changes nothing.

but what do i know. i am just a meditator. they are paid for their thoughts. i can only throw mine into comments in blogs.