During the last day the web has been abuzz about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity. It’s an addon for Firefox that can help you streamline how you get things done on the web. In the example above, they show constructing an email with a map and reviews using mostly keyboard driven input. The addon is quick to install and we think you’ll find it saving you a lot of time on tasks you’d normally hit the search box for. In the popup, you can do quick Wikipedia lookups, define words, translate, perform calculations, and many other operations. You can email a page to someone by just typing three words. The best part is: anyone can write a command that will expand Ubiquity’s function. Greasemonkey helped fix broken websites and we think Ubiquity will help make interactions between sites much easier. We can’t wait to see what clever uses people come up with.
19 thoughts on “Ubiquity, A Browser Command Line”
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“abimanyu raja atul varma aza raskin blair mcbride jono dicarlo gialloporpora chris beard dan mills myk melez dietrich ayala” is a good substitute for community.
fing sweet! thank you hackaday and thank you mozilla!
looks nice but also looks like it could be a very, well let me change that excessively malicious tool for the unscrupulous out there. Not saying bad things about it, just looks like it could be used for very bad things
Man makes a powder that burns fast and bright. It is used to make stunning displays of light in the night sky. Then some one tries something, then boom, now a device that can hurt people. next thing we know we have bullets that kill. Gunpowder.
This has great potential for good, which means that it also has potential for malice. A regrettable truth. Lets hope that people choose to do the right thing.
Mozilla, great tool, keep up the good work and make the Internets a better place.
Pratice safe surfing.
Peace!
Yes, it could be used for malicious purposes, but still, it is a very powerful tool, and customizable, it will be a strong app in the future.
of course on alpha stage, there could be some nasty bugs in it, but as I said, powerful indeed.
I found out about this from another site earlier today, and it’s awesome.
Does anybody have some good websites for commands (or just cool individual commands) that they’d like to share?
Commands can be found through about:ubiquity
or using the ‘help’ command in ubiquity.
#3: Yeah definitely looks verrry hackable.
Awesome thing nonetheless. Take a look at adaptivepath’s Aurora.
Nice but it will make a big overload on web servers like wikipedia
Everytime you type a command like
“wikipedia something”, it searcher for resumes of related articles…
Maybe an audit of requests volume would be nice for these site before we put all them down.
I think its useless, i’ve instaled it and I can do some of the things so much faster by typing a url and pasting a link etc
Wow, I have just installed this and I’m psychked – this is cool. And lets face it, best Hot Key Ever.
http://vimperator.mozdev.org/
Vimperator is better. Just so everyone knows.
Why would anyone want to make their browser work like vim? Vim, while useful in a command-line environment, is completely worthless outside of one.
How much fun is the “edit” command – come on imagine the office pranks you can have with your fellow techies in the office. Just change the preview of their webpage they are trying to code ehehehehe
I haven’t downloaded it yet, but it sounds a lot like the keyword functionality they’ve had set up since like FF 1.0. I have a bookmark to WP searches set up so I can just type “w [term]” and search. Same with Google, IMDB, etc. If I really cared to, I suspect I could even manage to open a GMail Compose like that. What else does this buy you?
How can this be used maliciously, that other tools on the web already aren’t being used maliciously?
I’m a fan of the Hyperwords addon for these kind of tasks. If you’re already selecting text with the mouse, the menu is right there and uses the text as a parameter. No need to use the keyboard.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1941
or
http://www.hyperwords.net/
[…] met with largely positive and excited reviews from the tech community, from folks at Lifehacker to Hackaday to Tools for Thought. The extension currently allows for a variety of commands. The common example […]
Looks cool; finally, firefox does something Opera hasn’t done ten years ago.