Ubiquitous Firefox

So yesterday I was getting that "must-fiddle-with-my-computer" feeling again and I heard about this new extension for Firefox called Ubiquity. Good timing, I was in the mood for a new toy.

Ubiquity is really brand new: its release from Mozilla Labs is 0.1, this baby is right out of the delivery room. Despite that, it's a pretty solid piece of software, as prototypes go.

Mozilla Labs describes Ubiquity as a do-it-yourself mashup tool. How buzzwordy. Basically it allows Firefox users to use plain-language commands to take data from a web site and use it however they want. For instance, I can select a bunch of text on a web site, hit the Ubiquity hot key combination, and type "email this to Amanda" and zing! Up comes my Gmail page with a composed message ready and addressed to my boss. (Yes, brown-nosing has never been easier...)

This e-mail functionality also works very well with Google Maps, which is sweet, because sending a graphical map as opposed to a link is very nice.

I can also type "twitter" and then a tweet, and it'll be posted. "wikipedia" on a selected bit of text will bring up an entry in Wikipedia.

You get the idea.

Now, a lot of these functions are things I can do already inside of Firefox. I'll use Twitbin for twittering, and the Search Engine bar to Wikipedia something. Having them all in one place is certainly appealing. The real strength in Ubiquity is the ability to add additional commands as you find them on the Web. So a hot new web site could make a JavaScript-based Ubiquity command available for download. There's even a verification screen to confirm you want to download said command, which actually shows you the block of code you're about to plug into Ubiquity. I like the tranparency, though it's likely not useful for non-developers.

So far, I have had zero problems with Ubiquity on my openSUSE machine. I noted on the Ubiquity tutorial page, unfortunately, that "On Linux, Ubiquity isn't fully supported yet. Some of the commands will work, but others won't. This is because we're missing a system to display output messages."

Okay, this isn't a huge problem and I know this falls into the nitpicky category, but wouldn't it be nice if an open source project gave some props to the open source operating system and gave it equal capabilities?

Like I said, I haven't been stopped yet by limited functionality, so this is just me grousing. On the whole, this is a really interesting tool, and I'll be curious to see how it grows.