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Makers of Firefox come up with a new Web browser

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Imagine taking the social experience of a site like Facebook or MySpace and integrating it into a Web browser so that collaboration and communication with friends and colleagues is completely seamless.

Adaptive Path, a Web design company, in partnership with the people at Mozilla Labs (a virtual lab connected to the Mozilla Foundation, the Firefox browser creators), want to do just that. In this video, they show one possible future scenario of the Web: Aurora.

Here's what it means:  Let’s say you were in Japan and your business partner is in Ohio and you are working on a power point presentation. No need to e-mail the file back and forth. Using Aurora you could both work on the piece, view it discuss it, and make changes in real time. Call it extreme collaboration. Of course there are similar programs that allow us to work virtually on screens in another country, like Adobe ConnectNow and GoToMeeting, but this concept is built for the everyday browser, with a supposedly simple interface.


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AdaptivePath released part 1 of their video series two days ago – and then just last night they launched part 2 – which shows what happens when the browser goes mobile. With a mere stamp of a thumbprint on a paper-thin card all browser data is transferred to the "mobile" card and the user is good to go. But, when you watch this segment, you might, like some of its commenters, think it looks surprisingly familiar. It looks like an iPhone.

 

Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo

There appear to be no plans to go to market with this and no one is saying it will replace Firefox. For now it's simply a concept to explore.