Ubiquity: Experimental Firefox extension which adds remarkable functionality & speed to browsing!

On August 26th Mozilla released an “experimental” Firefox extension that promises to substantially change your browsing experience.

Ubiquity enables you to surf the internet by utilizing simple language commands as opposed to the traditional point and click method.

Once installed, a simple, customizable combination of keystrokes (I used Ctrl + U) launches Ubiquity.  Although still in development, a good deal of functionality is already available.

A glimpse of Ubiquity’s functionality that just scratches the surface…

Search amazon.com for books

Launch Ubiquity, type in amazon and then the words from any book title or subject. In this case I was looking for the book by Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin entitled “Your Money or Your Life;” I simply typed “amazon your money your life.” Click on the link of your choice and you’ll go to that listing at amazon.com!

Search YouTube for videos:

Here I typed “you affirmation girl” to find Lisa Nova’s Affirmation Girl series…

Click on the video of your choice and it’s immediately launched @ YouTube.

Define unfamiliar words

Simply highlight a word and type “define this:”

Perform quick calculations:

Simply type “calculate” and a mathematical formula - the result is generated in the window below…

Undo Command

As I typed this post I inadvertently deleted the image above. To retrieve it, I simply hit Ctrl+U to launch Ubiquity, and typed “u.” The Undo command appeared and I hit Enter; the image returned.

Map functionality

I searched for restaurants in the Kansas City area and several looked interesting to me. Highlighting the address to one, I then typed in “map this” and a thumbnail Google Maps map appeared below-

Click on the map to enlarge it, zoom in for greater detail:

Compose a blank email, relaunch Ubiquity (the information from the last search or function is still there) and click the link you see above in the lower right corner “Insert map in page,” and the map is inserted into your blank email:

You can now email the map to a friend - or even include reviews or directions!

You can also type in “map” and an address to generate a map, of course.

More functionality - the context menu!

Highlight any information you find on the web, right click, scroll down and click on Ubiquity, and a context menu is launched. Looking at a restaurant? Check reviews on Yelp. Want to look up something on Wikipedia? Highlight the text, and click on Wiki in the context menu. The list goes on and on…

(

Email content to anyone

One of the slickest aspects of Ubiquity is the ability to highlight something, launch Ubiquity, and type  “email this” and someone’s name. Ubiquity will scan your Contacts list and propose recipients (it only works with Gmail at this point, by the way.)

The power at your fingertips is quite amazing. Want to search Flickr quickly? Just type flickr and a subject. (For more intensive searches I still would rely upon Comp Fight.) Here I searched for Golden Gate Bridge; just hit enter from this point and you’ll be delivered to the full search results at Flickr.

The list of what’s possible with Ubiquity is extensive, and will continue to grow as new commands are created (the code for Ubiquity was released by Mozilla Labs as open source software.)

In looking back at the examples I’ve included here I realize I truly have merely scratched the surface. If you’re a Firefox user and haven’t checked out Ubiquity yet, I encourage you to do so - it really is remarkable and an entirely different way to navigate and interact with the internet. You can find Ubiquity here.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!