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Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future.

Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

Interface is of the Utmost Importance

There are few things more important to the user experience than the interface through which we interact with the web. There is SO much potential for improvement in user interfaces! We wrote about some cutting edge strategies in this post in March, User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload (see the awesome 2D/3D game interface at the end of that post). Lately we've been inspired by the interfaces of apps like Skitch (see video at the very bottom of the page) and Jive's ClearSpace.

The First Round of Ideas

As any good call to action should, Mozilla's Concept Series kicked off with some examples of concepts submitted. All three of the videos below are very well produced but Mozilla says that you can submit mockups, prototypes or ideas expressed with any degree of sophistication. For instructions on making a submission visit the Concept Series announcement or just tag an image "mozconcept" on Flickr. That's what we did with our vision below these videos.


Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Bookmarking and History Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.What I'd Like to See

Here's my vision of an interface I'd like to interact with the web through, though it probably wouldn't take much Mozilla energy to make it happen.

I love the Adobe AIR newsticker Snackr but more than that what I want are big pastel-colored buttons that appear wherever I'm interacting with information that I can assign tasks to. As may buttons as I want, with tasks that will send URLs or the information in those pages to another application or webpage. I'd like the buttons to have rounded corners, too. :)

In the image above I've got buttons to bookmark the link I'm looking at in my social bookmarking tool (I use Ma.gnolia), to open tabs searching for the links present in one of my Custom Search Engines, to search for this link in social media discussion aggregator YackTrack and to IM the link to multiple co-workers via Adium. In time I might find that there are other functions I'd like to add, re prioritize or replace the above with. It that too muck to ask? I don't think it is at all. Let me know when someone has built it - but for now, I'll tag it "mozconcept" and cross my fingers.

What about you, what would you like to see the future of the web look like?







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