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Mozilla Labs Blog

Exploring the Future of the Web

Welcome to the first issue of about:labs, a new weekly newsletter that showcases innovation across the Mozilla community. In the coming weeks we’ll adopt the same infrastructure as the popular about:mozilla newsletter.

Concepts of the Week

Here’s some ideas we’ve found that have sparked thoughts in our minds from the Concept Series and across the Web; we hope they inspire you, too.

Please do join us and contribute your own thoughts, mock-ups, or prototypes. We’ll be highlighting new concepts each week.

Herdict Web is an upcoming project that aims to make diagnosing network accessibility problems a lot easier.
Web of Trust is a Firefox extension that aims to warn you before you enter a risky website through a social web-of-trust model.
Maxview of Browser History is an interesting mock-up of visual browser history.

Mozilla Labs in Tokyo: Firefox Developer ConferenceNovember 10

Firefox Developers Conference 2008 Tokyo is just around the corner. It’s just a week away — on the 16th of November, from 10:30am until 7pm at Belle Salle Jimbocho. Just like Firefox itself, the conference is free. We’ll have an after party so we can all chat more informally.

To highlight a couple Labs-related projects that are on the schedule: Jay Sullivan, VP of Mobile, will be doing a keynote on Mobile Firefox and the challenges we face in creating the “One Web”. Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Labs, will do a secondary keynote on Ubiquity and how to connect the web with language. Later in the day, Dan Mills, lead developer for Weave, will talk about creating a seamless user experience across all devices. There’s a bunch of other great topics and panels, too. You can see a full list here.

We hope to see you soon!

Mozilla Labs Meetup - Wednesday 11/12November 7

It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s Labs Night will be next Wednesday, November 12th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.

We are super excited about this session. The teams from Seedcamp are spending the week in Silicon Valley and will be joining us on Wednesday evening. Several Mozilla folks will be giving lightning talks - Dion Almaer will be discussing the Ajax revolution and how it dovetails with UX; Jono DiCarlo will give an update on Mozilla Labs projects; and David Ascher and the Thunderbird team will discuss their latest UI experiments. We’ll also have time for discussion, hacking, and of course, pizza :).

If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP in the comments so we know how many to expect. Thanks!

Concept Series Design Jams at University of MichiganOctober 30

In September a group of HCI students at the University of Michigan’s School of Information began a series of design jams focused on the future of the browser. These awesome events aim to contribute ideas to the Concept Series. When we launched the series we put out a call for “industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web”. These students are doing just that.

Headed by Liz Blankenship, a current Masters student in the HCI program, the first satellite Labs night encouraged brainstorming around how to create a better browser. The students divided into four groups - Tabs, History, Automation, and Web Apps - and discussed use cases present in each. Check out a complete wrap up of the event on the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction website. The second event, held in October, took ideas generated at the first session and expanded them into mockups and sketches. The students again broke into teams and dove into fleshing out details around each concept. More details

Mozilla Labs in Berlin: Hack DaysOctober 16

Announcing three great opportunities to hang out and hack with Mozilla Labs! As part of the Labs whistle-stop tour through Europe, we will be hosting Hack Days at c-base in Berlin. These sessions will be super informal and totally flexible - join for any part of the day to code, ask questions, or just hang out. Meet the leads for high-profile future-of-the-web experiments including Weave, Ubiquity, Geode, and Personas.

Lightening presentations every two hours on Labs projects. Open slots for anyone else who wants to do a lightening presentation on their own project.
Showcase presentations for projects people have been working on during the Hack day
Workshops for web best practices
Previews of new content features in Firefox 3.1 (SVG Transforms!)
Workshops and tutorials for making Ubiquity commands
Competitions around story boarding new concepts, creating Ubiquity commands, and Geode-enabled sites

Schedule:

Tuesday 10/21
3-7:00pm Mozilla Labs Hack Day 1 at c-base
Weave in the afternoon, Ubiquity in the late afternoon/evening

Wednesday 10/22
12:30pm-7pm Mozilla Labs