Mozilla, the group that oversees scores of volunteer programmers collaborating on the free Firefox Web browser, hopes to attract more visionaries to help change the way people surf the Internet, a newspaper report said on Tuesday.
This week, the group's research arm, Mozilla Labs, is calling for developers, designers and artists across the globe to ponder the future of the browser and submit their creative ideas, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
"We just touched the surface of the potential on the Web," Chris Beard, vice president of Mozilla Labs, was quoted as saying."Now we need to turn up the volume and to get more people involved, explore what the future could look like and inspire us to do it."
As part of the project, Mozilla Labs has teamed up with San Francisco-based Adaptive Path -- the designers behind MySpace's face-lift -- which created a series of concept videos that showcase the potential browser of the future, the paper said.
In one of the videos, for example, users can push, grab and lift all the objects in the browser, and surfing the Web feels more like moving through a 3-D space, with Web pages semantically organized in clusters. Users can also interact with each other on the Web page, easily sharing data through the browser or a mobile device, according to the paper.
"We are trying to make people's interaction with the technology more natural and more physical," said Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path. "Some of these things are right around the corner, and some will take another 10 years to unfold."
Mozilla, in Northern California, hopes the project also attracts other creative types.
"Traditionally, you would have to submit code, but now you can just bring an idea, even a sketch on a piece of paper," Beard said.
Created in 2003 with startup money from America Online's Netscape division, the group gained visibility when its free Firefox browser emerged as a challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
In the past three years, Firefox's market share of Internet users has grown more than 11 percent. In July, Firefox accounted for 19.2 percent of the market, compared with 73 percent for Microsoft, according to Net Applications, an online measurement company.
Earlier this year, Mozilla set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads, with more than 8 million people downloading Firefox 3 in one day.
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