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.