Craig.Carlen[Online].com

I remember when I first got on-line - it was before the World Wide Web was common place; Telnet and Gopher on the other hand were.  After about two years of playing around on what is now commonly referred to as the Application Layer of the TCP/IP Model (still sans a ‘browser‘), I was invited to be a part of Microsoft’s beta testing of their new Microsoft Network.  I had previously dinked around AOL and wanted no part of that - even then AOL was full of chats and message boards that proclaimed nothing more than “type 1 if you think _____ is ______“.  (To this day I still cannot fathom anyone paying hard earned money for the horrid service.)  Microsoft Network was to launch with the release of Windows 95 - which I also beta tested (before the Windows 95 preview program that upset so many MSN users at the time).

Needless to say, the WWW is vastly different from those days 13 years ago.  Microsoft Network was predominantly thread-based navigation - major interest areas with multiple subtopics that created various points of discussion.  That was not the WWW.  While working for Microsoft Network I discovered the Mosaic web browser and got my first real taste of the WWW.  That feels like a lifetime ago considering what’s found on the web today.  We’re already getting small glimpses of the future of the web - IPv6 is the first real indication of that.  The current internet layer protocol - IPv4 - is quickly running out of available addresses.  But the number of IP addresses IPv6 will be able to provide (2¹²⁸ BTW) is the sort of stuff most of us really don’t care about.  As long as the address that is typed in the address bar brings us to the place we intend, we’re happy.  99.9% of us really don’t care about the how’s, where’s, and why’s behind how it all happened.  What we do care about is the usability of the interface we’re using to get all of that accomplished.  Right now, my preference for that interface is the FireFox browser coupled with about a dozen and a half add-on extensions that allow FireFox to do so really cool things - most of which are important to me.  Others prefer other browsers like Opera, Safari, Konqueror, or even Internet Explorer (although I’ve yet to figure out why anyone purposely uses Internet Explorer…but that’s for another blog entry).

Recently Mozilla Labs (the creators of FireFox) initiated the Concept Series and invited developers to dream about, inspire, and design for the next generation of the web.  The first itiration of that is Aurora from Adaptive Path:

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Brilliant Idea!, Computers, Good Design, Internet, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.