Introducing Ubiquity

Chris Beard

552 responses

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to.  You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.  This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task.  And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.

Enter Ubiquity

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

  • Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
  • Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
  • Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
  • Extend the browser functionality easily.

Learn more about Ubiquity and the capabilities that it could provide for users and developers.

The Initial Prototype

As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Ubiquity and the possibilities that it opens up. This release is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.

Install the prototype and you’ll be presented with a tutorial to get you started.

Ubiquity 0.1

  • Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  • Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  • Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

This is the goal of what kinds of language-based services Ubiquity hopes to inspire people to create:


This is a screenshot of Ubiquity’s current map functionality:


Influences, References, and Background Resources

For a full list, see the credits page.

Get Involved

Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Ubiquity experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:

We’ve also started compiling a suggestion list for possible Ubiquity commands. If you have any suggestions, add them here or get inspired and develop one of them and add them to the command repository.

552 responses

  1. James wrote on :

    Downloaded and installed Ubiquity… tried to use the map-these command as shown in the tutorial… doesn't work…. what might I be doing wrong?

  2. Marco wrote on :

    Sorry, but this link is 404 https://labs.toolness.com/ubiquity-herd/

  3. Peter wrote on :

    I will change to chrome if this project dropped. I am still waiting the version for firefox 4..

  4. Razvan wrote on :

    Is Enso open-source still alive ?

  5. Majk wrote on :

    pretty cool ting. Keep on going guys.

  6. MACK wrote on :

    Is this project alive?

  7. G.AYYILDIZ wrote on :

    I’ve grown to love and rely upon Ubiquity over the past month or so, but with today’s release of 3.1 beta 3, Ubiquity now crashes Firefox instantly upon startup. I’ve enabled

  8. T wrote on :

    hahahaa

    AKABEY, based on how long it took Microsoft to copy tabbed browsing, this should take a decade to copy. 😀

  9. tyler wrote on :

    An absolutely stunning display of webapi’s. This makes many web services seem like native apps.

  10. Hiroshi Kosaka wrote on :

    I will try this software.
    Thank you.

  11. AKABEY AKYUREK wrote on :

    I’m loving this too 🙂 Lets see IE copy that…

  12. Alexandre Pelletier wrote on :

    Well, it looks like Google Wave is taking the concept a step further. http://wave.google.com/

  13. Freedomstar wrote on :

    I have been starting to rely on Ubiquity ever day. I have to say, its one of the greatest add-ons I’ve ever used. Excellent job on this! I can’t wait to see how it turns out in the future.

  14. sohbet wrote on :

    I’ve grown to love and rely upon Ubiquity over the past month or so, but with today’s release of 3.1 beta 3, Ubiquity now crashes Firefox instantly upon startup. I’ve enabled every other add-on I use without trouble, but the moment I enable Ubiquity, no matter how many or few other add-ons are enabled, Firefox fails on me. Any thoughts anyone?

  15. sohbet wrote on :

    Latest version of ubiquity (0.1.7.1) is not working with latest Firefox release (3.0.8). Even basic commands like search, imdb or anything does not work. I tried to uninstall and reinstall and subscribed to the herd as well again.

  16. sohbet wrote on :

    Just a quick note about the download. I realize there’s a link to the download within the body copy, but how about including another link or button in a more prominent spot?

  17. sohbet wrote on :

    I used Opera for a long time, but Mozilla is so much better and always great idea such ^^this.

  18. Non Profit Organization wrote on :

    really a great thing

  19. Ashley wrote on :

    Hands down the best add-on for firefox, simply amazing and i can’t wait to see it improve for the future!

    10/10

  20. forumrizem wrote on :

    Great job!! Support for Google Apps would be awsome

  21. Harald wrote on :

    Keep the typing, or make icons optional. On the other hand, when this is extended to, ohh let’s say, 50 commands, a bunch of small icons would be more of a disturbance then actual help. To me, typing in the commands came natural, it’s really the bast way of doing it.

    The progam, consept it self, is really grat, one of the best i’ve come across in a long time. Downloading it for my fathers laptop now as I write ^^

    Some things that would be nice tho, is to get this as a wider program. Not just a firefox adon. Think of this running in the background of your computer at all times, doing what you want with just pressing to buttons and typing a command?

  22. Márcio Vinícius Pinheiro wrote on :

    I strongly agree with xtraa! I simply can’t remember all the English (or even if they were in Portuguese) commands and the syntax. Maybe that’s why I prefer to use simple “Context Search” extension, which I can access from a normal context menu, and which gives me the results in a new tab (the normal way of the Firefox).

    This is a awesome tool with an awful usability and with features that we simply don’t need.

    but that’s good, keep working. 😉

  23. Márcio Vinícius Pinheiro wrote on :

    I’m still searching for a good use of all those features. I’m really satisfied with my simple “Context Search” extension.

    but, anyway, congrats for the hard work.

  24. xtraa wrote on :

    the first time i used it somewhere in early 2008 I noticed that there is a huge problem with ubiquity.

    I (especially as a non native speaker) can’t remember all the english commands and the syntax.

    SO GET RID OF the typing-crap and use DRAG&DROP with ICONS instead.

  25. Luke wrote on :

    Great job!! Support for Google Apps would be awsome!!

  26. Аватарки wrote on :

    Very useful! Goooood!

  27. Tanfer wrote on :

    Merci Veerle!!!

    Make it simple 😉

  28. chodor wrote on :

    it’s not working with the latest firefox (3.0.8) sine 0.1.7 – no commands working, none!

  29. Alwaysup wrote on :

    不得不说这是心仪已久的东西！感谢开发人员的努力！如果这个能与Vim类似的工具结合起来或推出桌面版应该就更了不起了！

  30. Andreas Viklund wrote on :

    Love it! Love love LOVE it! Didn’t think I would even get started, being a bit of a traditionalist who usually install new things and end up not using them anyway. But this is so smooth that I can’t avoid it!

    I’d be very interested in getting involved in the project or the community some way, either in theme design or marketing (or anything, really). If there are any other fans out there thinking the same, please let me know.

  31. Joel Sanderson wrote on :

    This is sweet, thanks team! Extremely useful for web apps.

    Are there any plans to make ubiquity available for the entire system, rather than just the browser? For example, say there’s a process that is hung in windows, a command like “kill [process]” would be amazing. Or “save screenshot” or “start [program]”.

  32. yy wrote on :

    Help, please add “www.baidu.com” to serach engine.

  33. Basisrente wrote on :

    I used Opera for a long time, but Mozilla is so much better and always great idea such ^^this.

  34. Shriram R wrote on :

    Latest version of ubiquity (0.1.7.1) is not working with latest Firefox release (3.0.8). Even basic commands like search, imdb or anything does not work. I tried to uninstall and reinstall and subscribed to the herd as well again.

  35. milena wrote on :

    This is amazing. I don’t know how I lived without it. Great job!

    m

  36. roland wrote on :

    this combined with voice recognition and the future symantic web is what we need

  37. Gerold Hoehler wrote on :

    Hi,
    update 0.1.7.1 failed.

    Firefox could not install the file at

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/9527

    because: Download error
    -228

    Best regards

  38. resimler wrote on :

    Just a quick note about the download. I realize there’s a link to the download within the body copy, but how about including another link or button in a more prominent spot?

  39. Jessica wrote on :

    amazing, it’s quicksilver or the lesser spotlight resimler for the new computer, the browser. now we need to get this to work with flash. or rather flash to work with everything else.

  40. Xavier Mazellier wrote on :

    Amazing idea! I like the simplicity to use and develop!

  41. medopal wrote on :

    i tried it for long time (on Mac and PC) both Firefox 3.0 its awesome, and never find any glitch

    I know its fully functional now, but do u have a plan to set out of the labs?

  42. Richard wrote on :

    I tried the map it function and the map didn’t fill on the u page. Is there some setting I have that inhibits the functionality? Is there a forum?

  43. perdeci wrote on :

    I try to send email to an adress that isn’t in my adress book but i can t do. I copy the page make the selection email this to

  44. johnny t wrote on :

    This is a great tool – just discovered it. Keep working on it. Solves a very clear problem.

  45. alparslan wrote on :

    Inspired me to blog about it! Great App!

  46. Zach wrote on :

    It looks really cool. I wish there was a way I could get Firefox on my iPhone though.

  47. TurboFool wrote on :

    I’ve grown to love and rely upon Ubiquity over the past month or so, but with today’s release of 3.1 beta 3, Ubiquity now crashes Firefox instantly upon startup. I’ve enabled every other add-on I use without trouble, but the moment I enable Ubiquity, no matter how many or few other add-ons are enabled, Firefox fails on me. Any thoughts anyone?

  48. fsbnetwork wrote on :

    good idea , thanks you mozilla labs.

  49. salihrocker wrote on :

    Thanks you. This is great we need more people creating more intuitive and efficient ways to navigate the Web. Who else is doing anything nearly this good?

  50. salihrocker wrote on :

    word. this is one of the most inventive tools i’ve seen in the last 10 years. Don’t let them stop you. this is the future.

  51. mobilya aksesuari wrote on :

    hello
    You might want to get rid of those. I try to send email to an adress that isn’t in my adress book but i can t do

  52. Peter Vatistas wrote on :

    I am completely addicted to Ubiquity and I cannot wait for more updates and further integration!! THANK YOU GUYS!!

  53. Grivan wrote on :

    Pure Genius!
    This is one of the things which makes web much more meaningful and easy to use.
    I am already so much excited what will it finally come out to be.

  54. laga wrote on :

    Just a quick note about the download. I realize there’s a link to the download within the body copy, but how about including another link or button in a more prominent spot? It took me awhile to figure out where this was.

  55. ARTI wrote on :

    That is fantastic. As a developer that is very cool. On the general user side though I see it as being still having a developer’s mindset. There are commands that resemble to be too much for developers than general public use.
    Oh yeh the looks like some spam got through on this post too. You might want to get rid of those. I try to send email to an adress that isn’t in my adress book but i can t do. I copy the page make the selection email this to.. when i enter the command i see my e mail send page but with no e mail adress in “to” part. I strongly suggest that you cooperate with the author of the Firefox add-on “Devo”! You two are in fact the same idea! Work together and you’ll make it the best!

  56. chisophugis wrote on :

    I would really like to see Ubiquity include much of what the Google toolbar does. That would allow a lot of functionality and conserve some screen real estate, not to mention streamline access.

  57. warmowski wrote on :

    Am I dreaming or did persistent text highlighting once work and now doesn’t? I can use the highlight comand, but reloading the page doesn’t keep he highlighting.

    Love Ubiquity. Hope you add tab-to-complete commands soon. (And persistent highlighting, if it’s really gone and it’s not just me)

  58. mobilya aksesuarlari wrote on :

    thanks you Keep continue this good work.

  59. vidhyadharan D wrote on :

    Very much useful for me., Good work,
    this plugin reduce my time ,

    Keep continue this good work.

    Excellent ,wonderful

  60. George Campbell wrote on :

    I just upgraded Ubiquity to 1.6
    Now the TR command does not work (translation error)
    German to English
    French to English

  61. Niko wrote on :

    The next step in serious integration. Transparent Internet.

  62. Ryan wrote on :

    Found another installer here:
    https://people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.xpi

    Was having the same issue getting to the page
    Seems you can’t subscribe to the HERD right now either…

  63. Strawberry Macaw wrote on :

    I want a way to highlight text with the mouse, right-click, and add yellow highlighting to emphasize that text. For example, I was just reading the provisions of the new Stimulus Bill and finding things that apply to me, and I needed a way to mark them for review later.

  64. Isaac wrote on :

    I need to be able to link commands together – like map “location” near chatsworth + yelp “location” near chatsworth + mail this to contact.

    The ability to string commands would be awesome!

    Also, as others have noted – this needs to be a stand alone app that works at the OS layer and integrates with third party apps like Outlook, etc (less realistic I know), this would be awesome!

  65. Alex Smith wrote on :

    Just noticed one more thing, the websites that the user gets re-directed to are US sites, such as http://www.amazon.com. What would be good is to detect the source IP, use that to determine my location and then use localised websites first. For example, in my case, http://www.amazon.co.uk rather than http://www.amazon.com. Otherwise Ubiquity will be limited in use to certain areas.

    Alex

  66. Alex Smith wrote on :

    Really like it guys well done! Some improvements that would be cool would be:

    – To have it as a separate application that runs in the system tray. So you could be typing a document and just insert a map, or email some text, etc.

    – To associate with my gmail account without having to navigate to gmail and login first.

    – Doing the above, but with facebook, so a command could be ‘write on Joe Bloggs wall ‘ or ‘profile pic this’.

    Anyways just a thought.

    Alex

  67. Ahad Bokhari wrote on :

    Guys, thank you ever so much – this is a wonderful extension and an “intelligent” idea.

  68. Harry wrote on :

    wow.. this is.. really amazing!!! couldn’t stop wowing. =)

  69. tyuoreb wrote on :

    emailing doesn’t work. I don’t know if it is because i have windows or what but it doesn’t work

  70. Pete wrote on :

    Inspired me to blog about it! Great App!

    http://www.internetinnovation.org/blog/entry/a-sneak-peak-at-the-ubiquitous-web/

  71. ugubabba wrote on :

    after just a few clicks…

    try add a “whois”
    also if you add personal data it should be possible to do a map me query or similar, map x, according to common social networking profiles. what would be really interesting is a search engine result compilation. i.e. a “gather” command.. or similar. Never mind, this is the beginning of something big. Whats missing is a gui. text is the base but it should develop into point n click or context based actions.

    Make the world a little smaller 😉
    Cheers.

  72. ugubabba wrote on :

    word. this is one of the most inventive tools i’ve seen in the last 10 years. Don’t let them stop you. this is the future.

  73. Jeff Langston wrote on :

    Very cool, but what would really make this incredible would be to make this a service in OS X so it’s available to all apps, maybe even hook into the Data Detectors service. Or how about a Quicksilver plugin?

  74. Wally wrote on :

    I use a tablet, keyboard = yuck I but do like!

  75. Matt Hodder wrote on :

    Just saw the write up about the proposed image editing program- I’m pumped for that. Ubiquity is an amazing tool.

  76. Diana wrote on :

    Whoa. Science Fiction has come to life. Awesome.

  77. Fluffhead wrote on :

    There appears to be a problem with http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/. I can’t download this, and I must.. I MUST! It sounds like a great tool and I’m dying to try it. Is there another download location?

  78. Carlos wrote on :

    I am still getting familiar with ubiquity and find it impressive and easy to use for a non-techy guy like me. I have a question: While using the add-to-calendar command I noticed all events were added on the date the command was issued irrespective of the actual date of the event eg., if the command was issued on 2/4 for a 4/3 event, the calendar will show that event on 2/4 and not 4/3. Thereafter, you need to go to google calendar and move the event to the actual date.
    Can someone let me know how to go around this, if possible?

    Thanks

  79. kobracan wrote on :

    Why does Ubiquity have to append a tag to the user-agent string? And why doesn’t it remove that tag after I disable/uninstall the addon?

  80. john wrote on :

    v cool.

    would be good to see an expanded translate tool.

    Im learning spanish at the moment and its great to just type tr and then a word to get a translation without opening a new tab.

    What would make this brilliant is additional mashup capability

    for example – typing in a verb could give you a translation but also pull conjugations in various tenses and links to thesaurus etc showing similar words

  81. John wrote on :

    Great plugin

    A side note, the text on this page looks really messed up (ff3/xp). I have Helvetica Neue installed, and the text is all jagged looking. When I use Firebug to take Helvetica out of the font stack (reverting to Arial) it looks fine.

  82. turksila wrote on :

    Why does Ubiquity update the UserAgent string?

    This is not good… that is something malware does. Please leave my UserAgent unmolested, so that I might continue using Ubiquity. Until then, it is gone.

  83. Mike J wrote on :

    Quicksilver, Gnome Do, etc. use separate input areas for the object, action, and argument, and it’s possible to move between them with tabs. That’s a very useful design because it allows selecting each with just a few keystrokes.

    Why does Ubiquity use just a single command line? That makes editing and refining a command quite a bit more tedious.

  84. sikiş wrote on :

    Absolutely wonderful. This is how to get life done. Nice work, I hope there’s enough developer interest in this to bring this to the top of the popular plug-ins!

  85. David Beers wrote on :

    You mention mobile devices, but I suspect you underestimate how significant this kind of work is for mobile: not for user-created mashups, but for reducing the complexity and difficulty of using an application on the device at all. A natural language interface with prompting and auto-complete greatly ameliorates one of the major barriers to the adoption of mobile phone applications: the limited physical interface that makes drilling down through menus, finding the desired application, launching it and entering data a chore. I’ve been working on a mobile application environment that uses the same principles. Bravo for the great work bringing this to our desktops!

  86. Amor al wrote on :

    Great job! Love the dinamical and fast learning method.

    Go with it, go!

  87. dk wrote on :

    Nice promises but it doesn’t really work. No matter what I write to enter a new calendar entry either nothing happens or I get error 200 something.
    I would rather prefer not taking the mouth to full but showing some real tutorials. For all different operating systems if there are any differences.
    Here on Linux it seems to be random if something works.

  88. Nishanth wrote on :

    at NotGood: ok. i see your point. why spoil the excitement… huh?

  89. Nishanth wrote on :

    Crashes very frequently on a mac. great job guys! hope it works in future versions of chrome… sorry

  90. Chris wrote on :

    Why does Ubiquity update the UserAgent string?

    This is not good… that is something malware does. Please leave my UserAgent unmolested, so that I might continue using Ubiquity. Until then, it is gone.

  91. Brian wrote on :

    Why does Ubiquity have to append a tag to the user-agent string? And why doesn’t it remove that tag after I disable/uninstall the addon?

  92. Ankaboot wrote on :

    Just installed Ubiquity.

    It has lots of missing capabilities.. I do realize it is still in HUGE development though 😀

    Works wonders for me. No issues, freezing…etc.

    Tried the mapping on Gmail as in the video & I think it’s really cool. Also, it would be cooler if we are able to send maps not only in “Map” mode, but also in “Satellite” & “Hybrid” mode. Plus literally hundreds of additions!

    I wish everyone working on this great innovation all the best of luck. You made my day!

  93. Ksi wrote on :

    Seems cool, let’s hope it really works 🙂

  94. Marc wrote on :

    Anyone having issues with the latest version? I installed and my facebook-status and tweet commands stopped working. I uninstalled and re-installed and now the Ubiquity command doesn’t work, I can’t even get the window up.

    Anyone?

  95. AnBo wrote on :

    Hey.. isn’t it time for a version that is shiretoko compatible ?

    thx

  96. Ben wrote on :

    Great piece of coding. Absolutely amazing complement to Firefox. I’ve only been using a few days and I’m hooked. Still learning the fastest way to enter commands, but I can remove some bookmarks that I no longer need because of this…and the ability to include maps/photos in my gmail emails is awesome. @Not Good. Most users will never know what Ubiquity is or how to use it. Relax. And if your inbox is a PITA, write nice emails asking people to not send you any forwards.

    I am very excited to see where Ubiquity is headed. THANKS!

  97. Ed Grant wrote on :

    Any way to get Ubiquity to work with MicroB browser on the Nokia N800 / n810? This would be awesome!

    See: http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25692

  98. Not Good wrote on :

    This is not good technology. You are enabling morons to spam out things in email which are better done through links. I don’t want my aunt emailing me pictures and article snippets. I’d rather she send me URLs and a summary of why I might be interested.

    Your technology will make my inbox a bigger PITA than it already is. DOWN WITH UBIQUITY!

  99. shfx wrote on :

    @maze: you can’t… have you ever tried write something to the Bookmarklet or Greasemonkey?

    IMHO it’s the biggest invention of GUI interaction of the last 9 years! ;]

    Happy New Year Mozilla Labs Team! 😀 Keep up the good work!

  100. chris wrote on :

    when a program like this comes along,it makes me think of how over-hyped most technology is.
    that a simple tool like this is not already integrated with software proves that software development has a long way to go.
    or maybe it just shows the lack of creativity in most software developers.
    kudos for designing what is obvious.

  101. Henry wrote on :

    This is great–we need more people creating more intuitive and efficient ways to navigate the Web. Who else is doing anything nearly this good?

  102. das Moscas wrote on :

    This is awesome, keep up the good work!

  103. maze wrote on :

    Most of these stuff can be achieved by bookmarklets and greasemonkey ?

  104. UnspeakableyViolentJane wrote on :

    1.2 Isn’t launching. What happened?

  105. NeonXP wrote on :

    I’m sorry for my worst English…

  106. NeonXP wrote on :

    I found bug:
    When i start typing “php” in Ubiquity command line my Firefox crashed. I tried 3 times and all times Firefox crashed when i typed “php”

  107. Marcin wrote on :

    Is this project still in progress? Or has been abandoned?

  108. Aden Hepburn wrote on :

    Wow. that’s all i’ve got to say!

  109. Eylon Yogev wrote on :

    We at headup just love Ubiquity! Check our new headup – Ubiquity mashup: http://blog.headup.com/2008/12/headup-ubiquity-mashup/

    You can use this invite code: yogi123

  110. Domains at Retail wrote on :

    I was directed to this from a friend of mine telling me he uses it and is a great tool. By reading and seeing what it can do I can see this saving lots of people lots of time and grouping everything with an easy interface. Would love to see where this ends up in 6 months. Out of the labs? 🙂

  111. Gaiko wrote on :

    Sounds nice, really nice but is this planned to only be a firefox extension or is there any future to this being something that (oneday?) could work with any browser? kind of like QS or Launchy? I get the impression this is kind of like combining Launchy with yubnub no? Anyway, looks promising, might be enought to make FF my primary browser (maybe).

  112. Danilo Sousa wrote on :

    Brazilian users:

    http://ubiquity.danilosousa.net

  113. gvantsa wrote on :

    It’s great but,how can i download it???or how can i use it??…..

  114. brinduc wrote on :

    Is the download link broken?

  115. NeonBuddha wrote on :

    My only complaint is the lack of ability to combine command words, in a similar fashion to mathematic expression, like |email (map chicago comics) (Want to meet?) to Sarah.|, or |email you should bring a coat. (weather des moines) to george|

  116. Isam Rumaih wrote on :

    This is great, this is make live much easier, I just would like to comments in the way of entering the commands, which is (typing) as shown in the demo, I see it a bit default for non-English native speakers, where they miss spell words sometimes or even forget them totally, I recommend having some sort of help such as: a pop-up list of commands or icons.

  117. Alejandro wrote on :

    Open firefox 3.o.4 and pop ups takes too long. Some times seems like stop working. I’ve got this problem since 3.0.3

    Please, somebody help me (i love this Plug-in), probably an update or something

  118. buddyK wrote on :

    I love this!

    In the latest build, when I highlite and right click – ubiquity gives me no options.

    Perhaps a bug?

  119. Chris Loftus wrote on :

    A mention in my blog: http://www.dailythirst.com/2008/11/03/ubiquity-for-firefox/

    Amazing application!

  120. ali wrote on :

    i have posted about it on my blog.
    i’ll install it as soon as a stable version releases

    blog link
    http://www.linkw.info/2008/11/web-ubiquity/

  121. Ahmad Al-Nounou wrote on :

    There are major security concerns that have to be dealt with…

    HINT: more XSS

  122. ethana2 wrote on :

    John, you are not alone. Mozilla always seems to ignore other projects when they name stuff. I’m pretty sure Aurora was an actual browser out there before Mozilla just took the name and ran with it for something or other.

    That said, a graphical installation system and some browser enhancement should be different enough to not get confused much. If it’s its own package though, Ubuntu could have to get tricky with its naming..

  123. Alec wrote on :

    What has happened to the herd? It’s been down for several days!

  124. cp.tar wrote on :

    Good work!
    The command line re-invented; what more can a man want?

    Note that this is not a slur; the command line is the best possible interface for many things.

  125. Wang wrote on :

    I tried, it is nice job.
    However, I tried it on windows and the map command couldn’t display the preview Window.

  126. Alx wrote on :

    Few hours and i love it….

  127. njeppo wrote on :

    commands are not gone 4 me (FF, Windows), but maps doesn’t show up, the twitter extension shows no time-stream anymore, etc.

    FF slows also since the update, when started…

    I like this extension and hope these bugs will be repaired soon…

    THX!

  128. Jolene wrote on :

    Seriously? Yelp reviews? How are we supposed to get any viable information when they’re all inane narratives full of self-puffery? Try something more useful, please.

  129. barbara wrote on :

    I think the update did something unfavorable to ubiquity.

    I have had to restart firefox when ub commands go away. Then too, growl confirmations aren’t showing up (I’m on a mac).

    If there is a way for me to roll back to 0.1.1 I think I will do so.

  130. Burpee wrote on :

    I’ve been using the extension for several days now and I actually have a lot of use for it. I do a lot of research and work in different languages a lot of the time. This means I heavily use the translate function and the quick search functions.

    There is one thing which annoys me tremendously: there is no “recent commands” function. I tend to switch between different commands all the time, but this means that I have to type it in every time.

    Please, add such a function in the next release. It would increase my efficiency even more than it is already doing right now.

    Thanks for the great add-on! 😀

  131. rkms wrote on :

    An awesome extension. I was so impressed by this extension for Firefox that I blogged about it on my site. It is a real wonder that you guys were able to pull this off. A really useful project with huge potential for internet users.

    Kudos to the developers of Ubiquity.

  132. Scriptdaemon wrote on :

    Is it just me, or are all the commands gone now?

  133. landman wrote on :

    I installed the update this morning.

    Now when I highlight a word/phrase and hover over ‘ubiquity’ there are no options.

    As for Firefox I’m on the Mac version & have no slow down

  134. Ranjit wrote on :

    Same issue as donny2112 here. The 0.1.2 update caused Firefox to slow down everywhere – from launch to opening new windows. I disabled Ubiquity and it was breezing again. The Task Manager probably hints at some memory leak.

  135. donny2112 wrote on :

    Love Ubiquity. 0.1.2 reduced that love a bit. I really liked being able to just start typing and having it default to searching Google, but 0.1.2 removed that. I’m guessing it’s the “sandbox” update (i.e. separating command functionality) mentioned.

    I uninstalled 0.1.2, reinstalled 0.1.1, and started receiving Ubiquity error notifications with every use of Ubiquity. Ubiquity still worked, but it was annoying. I had to uninstall all of Firefox (3.0.3), including personal preferences, and do a fresh install of Firefox with Ubiquity 0.1.1 to fix the problem.

    I’m back to loving Ubiquity (0.1.1) again. 😛

  136. stig wrote on :

    Hi

    same problem as someone above. Just update to FF 3.0.3 with ubiquity 0.1.2.
    And firefox became so slow on starting, and on all new windows opening.
    I isolate ubiquity, with safe mode of firefox, as the cause of all that.

    too bad.

  137. Itai Raz wrote on :

    Just to let you know – Ubiquity is the extension that brought me back to Firefox (I was already hung on Chrome).

    Great stuff!

  138. James wrote on :

    you should for the calendar add– the ability for it to email you reminders… plus also be able to text you with appointment dates–

  139. blankdots wrote on :

    love to see this in Thunderbrid as well.

  140. dan wrote on :

    Why not add ubiquity to the title bar, like google chrome only better.

  141. Michael Shuffett wrote on :

    This could really be ground breaking imo in the future. I have been meaning to work on something similar for sometime I just never got around to it. Congratulations and thank you for the excellent work.

  142. Parafinli Korse wrote on :

    Guys, why is version 0.1.2 released yet??

  143. dskoelling wrote on :

    Further testing reveals that Ubiquity is somehow clashing with my iGoogle page. Didn’t formerly; does now. So now I have to choose which is the greater convenience to have–Ubiquity or iGoogle–and let the other one go?

  144. dskoelling wrote on :

    I used Ubiquity often enough that I had begun to rely on it; then on October 8 it suddenly started to crash Firefox (3.0.3) on the two computers on which I had installed it. After starting Firefox in safe mode, I isolated the Ubiquity extension as the problem and have had to disable it. I miss it!

  145. Sean wrote on :

    Would love it if someone could show me how (or do it 🙂 to make a search using http://www.mlslistings.com/Search/Quick.aspx

    (I often search street addresses or MLS numbers)

    Sean@CMPSguy.com

  146. Jaron wrote on :

    Very cool has loads of potential can’t wait to see how it progresses.

  147. Damien wrote on :

    Guys, why is version 0.1.2 released yet??

  148. Amax Guan wrote on :

    I have a suggestion on the way Ubiquity UI, that is when you enter the command like last-email,I want to type an enter after the command and directly open a new tab with my last-email in it. I want to do in a lot of type of commands

  149. IrishWonder wrote on :

    Great plugin! I am as conservative as they come and been using FF1.5 till lately – and this plugin was the factor that finally forced me to upgrade to FF3! I love the simplicity and how easily you can add your own commands – I have a bunch of things I always wished I could automate and now I can!

  150. fragge wrote on :

    IE already has this, and its better. I love firefox, mainly because of all my customizations which make web dev SO much easier, but IE is way ahead of you in the whole “innovating into the future” thing, and always has/will be, despite the fanboy attacks. Bring on Windows 7, multi-touch OS looks pretty damn nice. Also, what is with the whole FireFox/Google partnership? You guys are still burned that IE killed netscape? Who the HELL uses gmail, it blows. And Chrome? LOL after reading all of the advantages and features and getting excited, then using and benchmarking it and realising its a piece of crap, I certainly don’t use it for anything more than an ugly icon on my desktop. Google are good for 2 things only – maps, and search. Oh and wikipedia/live search aren’t in your default 2.0.0.16 FF search widget setup, gotta download em. That’s just stupid.

  151. Mike Brown wrote on :

    Hmm…something like the accelerators for IE8.

  152. powder wrote on :

    This kinda reminds me of Quicksilver for OSX. Nice.

  153. yasmin wrote on :

    Hi.

    I can’t seem to download Ubiquity. Please help.

    tx

  154. theWTP* (pt. 2) wrote on :

    damn, WTP#3 – short&simple Looking back, and noting the late hr. I realized I forgot the initial problem entirely.
    Watch the PR film above – notice how much PRIVATE-SIDE data was either handed to, or already was known to Google-Doubleclick.
    Ah, one restaurant invite – we know who you are, who your friends are, food you happen to like and where you’ll even be at a given time – for months, from your on-line calender, ditto several GOOGLE-BASED ‘FRIENDS’ lists!

    And he’s now started a rampant wave of misunderstanding of the origins of a word he learned by twittering an unchecked item to all his friends

    [If I really weren’t dead tired I’d talk about the TRUE story of the linguist who, as a joke, explained at a 1964 cocktail party how ‘hippie’ derived from the smoking of opium while reclining on one’s hip. his shock 7 years later as seeing his joke quoted in a newsmag as ‘truth’ and I found myself hearing same 14 years later from a sociology prof of mine who just stated this as fact, rather than opening an edited dictionary over a derivation that would seem rather suspicious to anybody allegedly trained to think. I told him – my grade dropped.]
    -30-

  155. theWTP* (pt. 2) wrote on :

    Hmmm… Well, as I said:
    I’ll take on the worst first, then work my way back here. When DEC and a grant or two put 72 high schools on a PDP-10 in ’71, hacking was born. 1st level hack was to leave a calling card on someone else’s account, 2nd, crash the machine Gold Prize- PATCH the hole in the OS that allowed 1 or 2.
    And the LIRICS 10 probably produced some of the finest security patches for DECSystem10.
    Problem is now the data isn’t ’bout My Conway’s Life sim is better than Yours, it’s about REAL LIFE and REAL MONEY,REPUTATIONS, and Bad Old Big Brother, be he corporate or government, or, can you tell me the difference anymore if the corporation’s big enough?
    So: the new sales pitch – you don’t NEED a high-power nework station on your desk or “expensive” software. Why you just rent our netwo, er, cloud of wonderful apps and places to store your stuff, and don’t worry, nobody could be more interested in security than WE are.

    Getting back to pulling together a collection of data in ways the original inventors of the mostly-hypothetical hypertext were … the fact is, that for their day, they did a good job, and arguably laid a good foundation – of course it would be better rebuilt for each instruction set in pure, old-fashioned bummed assembler code, because you can’t get better than that! Costs a lot but lasts a long time.

    Upon the foundation YOU the Programmers of the World (who, for a lot of reasons, the better you are, the farther away you are from the paradigms on which the world is actually based …[here would be a hyperlink to poor Phil Katz’s crime scene/autopsy reports]), with the aid of those who need your programs, would come a)improvements to the original markup language based on where computers went and are going, b) extensions to a public code with some kind of authority to set the standards, and allow new needs to quickly be met, c) and lastly, enough of you good coders saying “I want a decent living out of this, very comfortable (if I’m good) but not at the expense of Society (and a good job has been done here on that one – though its future is largely dependent on Social Darwinism vs. FDR’s ideas then and now again called “Socialism” while true socialists scratch their heads and say “we’re a million miles away from that Capitalist blue-party guy”…

    competing to develop better tools simply to let us non-coders make magic, that of the basic, standard, old-fashioned markup system + additions to account for music? Maps? graphs with 12 dimensions? systems that alter with every shift of the markets? New data on gene function (for a more noble example), or a 15th-generation of Nam Paik creating art for art’s sake!

    The making of tools is where the action belongs, not arguing over who will do things which way. Stop Reinventing. A traction/performance/mileage enhanced, nitrogen-filled,low-profile tire with deflation alarms on intensely strong and tough layered carbon/resin/titanium alloy system riding on ceramic bearings gives a much better, faster, safer ride than an iron-rimmed wooden-spoked model. But they are both wheels.

    Nobody’s tossed the idea out. But somebody forgot the whole Delphi madness of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and we are condemned to repeat it in spades, by students quoting the Wikipedia as if truth bursts free when the gatekeepers, with their knowledge of history and understanding that “fairness doesn’t mean that every issue has two sides, therefore Creationists who KNOW the real Bible was written by God in English [here would be a hypertext link to the first female governor of Texas who said so, as she eliminated funding for foreign language studies in any state school in the 1930s] deserve as much official World Knowledge webspace as those who have spent their lives studying evolution.

    Build GREAT TOOLS, not new standards – unless the former are necessary and work perfectly with the latter.

  156. theWTP* wrote on :

    Why do I get the *bad* feeling that Gordy Bell was right when he talked about going full circle with a cycle of technology then, doing it again “better”. For instance, making all of the stupid mistakes of Timesharing (excuse me, Virtual Machines instead of a big computer on everyone’s desk … or that pathetic concept that all the noise = signal or Delphi System (see J. Brunner’s ‘Shockwave Rider’), excuse me, Wickies.
    Timesharing, with its inherent cooperation and communications abilities (best exemplified by the PDP-10) died when the computer became the size of a terminal – or enough so that PRIVACY could be maximized. What we need now are high-power Workstations with a strongly-isolated ‘net component, so mine is mine, but I can see what of yours you WANT me to, not store and/or process my work on “our” cluster w/rented software. The Delphiniums, like Wikipedia have proven to be bad jokes. And each software co. says ‘I have a perfect pull-together system using MY system (which either gains ’em cash or eyes).
    The pre-computer idea of Hypertext and the FULL STHTML may lack more than a few links to pull together things its authors never dreamed possible. But how about going back there for a start and scrapping the hypertext-exclusive elements of AJax, Net2.0, MS(brand)Formats for Everything.New mechanics where the computer does everything are great, but there’s a fine structure older than I am, and there’s NO need to invent the wheel every time it comes ’round again. Instead of learning from the past, we are continually repeating the same mistakes -I’ll add a pt. 2 if this isn’t a mile too long already.

  157. Laura wrote on :

    This just knocks my socks off — I’m so glad my son pointed ubiquity out to me; he knew I’d love it!

  158. Ajith Mohan wrote on :

    Amazing….great job…

  159. dav wrote on :

    This is absolutely great! In fact, it makes me think a lot about slickrun (http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/)…

  160. Embomeope wrote on :

    Good Day! help me somebody please) where i can find some information about tasty food. What can I cook on my birthday? vigra buy cheap I realy need it, help me please! Thank you very much!

  161. Giveback.net wrote on :

    Well done. This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for social apps. Thanks!

  162. rotmat wrote on :

    toooo good….awesome

  163. hadi farnoud wrote on :

    awesome

  164. Jonas B wrote on :

    Nice! I have already removed my google searchbar from the browser ubiquity handles the search.. (only at the google.com domain then(i am dk))

  165. Alexander wrote on :

    Ubiquity really looks cool in the video. Let’s hope that a new version comes out soon, which actually works just as well as the demoed version does (yes, I’m aware of the version number :]).

  166. Migrashin wrote on :

    Awesome idea that has great potential!

  167. sayoz wrote on :

    yep is work in google mail, show me in yahoo

  168. Heb wrote on :

    What they say is true. The internet is very disconnected. Even the common browser is a horrible User interface for navigating the tones of information out there.

    Apps for fire fox like ‘ubiquity’ and ‘pic lense’ make navigating the internet much easier.

    This is still disconnected. You have to move from one app to another.

    The entire browser as we know it must be re-designed. There was a demo of Firefox for the I-phone that would be a good start.

    This however leads to another stage. Re-inventing the GUI for the operating system. Nether windows or macs OSX has a “good” GUI (Graphical User Interface).

    What we do need, is one easy to use window for EVERYTHING… then navigation might be a little easer.

  169. namii wrote on :

    Great add on to Firefox. I’ve used Enso for a while now and I love Ubiquity. I’m looking forward to some new Ubiquity verbs. The ability to do an “advanced search” would be nice, like “amazon music sufjan stevens” instead of always just giving books results.

    Thank you

    http://www.emlakarsa.net/

  170. anil wrote on :

    When would this be compatible with FF 3.0.5b shipped with Ubuntu?

  171. Zach J wrote on :

    I think it would be a cool feature to have a “email this to everyone” command.

  172. David Guyon wrote on :

    Ubiquity is the next step of user trends/habits with their Internet browser: totally amazing.

  173. danny costello wrote on :

    can someone help me — i was using chrome, and i downloaded ubiquity. once i tried to open up the xpi.file, it would just try to save it somewhere else, but would not open. i was unable to install it. a friend told me i needed to use firefox. installed that, but the same thing happened. how do i make it work?? and what is an xpi.file? do i need something special to work with that?

  174. Francisco wrote on :

    Ubiquity is just awesome but, but wouldn’t you say it would be better if it were on the computer, and you could integrate it in any app???

    I don’t know but still it’s a great tool

  175. Carlos Lorenzo wrote on :

    Great idea. It has to be polished. Let’s see if the Chrome thing doesn’t get in the way.

  176. Angelo wrote on :

    my bro showed me this a week ago. i was stunned. i dont see how anyone could hate this. im gonna show my computer teacher and eventually many other people. if this is the prototype… man this is gonna be awesome

  177. tracy wrote on :

    awesome.

    i would love to see a command for searching local libraries for highlighted text. maybe a “library ” or “library” (zipcode) command could search worldcat.org. you then could highlight a book title or even a subject and get a list of local library holdings.

  178. Christopher Collins wrote on :

    Great add on to Firefox. I’ve used Enso for a while now and I love Ubiquity. I’m looking forward to some new Ubiquity verbs. The ability to do an “advanced search” would be nice, like “amazon music sufjan stevens” instead of always just giving books results.

  179. mingz wrote on :

    Oh, so nice idea.

    To fred,
    I don’t know how many average users will use it. But even if this cool plugin gets on to 1% of computers, then it is an amazing success. Not to mention, most of the 1% are probably hardcore computer fans who use computers most.

    How many users actually write javascript and php scripts? No more than 0.1%. Then do you think jQuery and Zend are not successful? No, they are huge successes.

  180. fred wrote on :

    Another piece of Geek Crap. Do all of you live in such a tiny world that you really believe the average user will even try this???

    Get a life!!!

  181. Zach wrote on :

    Now we are getting somewhere. Well done.

  182. Jordan Levy wrote on :

    Blownaway….can’t wait for this technology to get further developed.

  183. Ruben Berenguel wrote on :

    A perfect addition to Firefox, easing interaction with frequent sites (wikipedia, google maps, youtube) and at the same time allowing for related things (I already love “define”). I’ll take a look at adding functionality, as I would like some “synonym” and “antonym”. Good work!

  184. Ahmet Bektes wrote on :

    in my opinion it is not so easy.. Like learning a code language… Maybe like English everybody has to learn a common language for internet , huh?

  185. Benjamin wrote on :

    Good works Geeks !

    But hurry up guys Google Chrome is out !

    Google Chrome could include natively Google map Mashup and so on.

  186. Jbx028 wrote on :

    For the ones which are interested, i wrote the following command which allows you, to send any text selected to the famous nabaztag (www.nabaztag.com) :

    const TOKEN = “XX”
    const SN = “XX”
    const VOICE = “XX”

    CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
    name: “nabz”,
    takes: {ttstext: noun_arb_text},
    homepage: “http://twitter.com/jbx028”,
    author: {name: “Johnny Baillargeaux”, email: “jbx028@hotmail.com”},
    license: “MPL”,
    preview: “Your Nabaztag will repeat this text right now !!”,

    execute: function(stext) {

    var baseUrl = “http://api.nabaztag.com/vl/FR/api.jsp”
    var params = {sn: SN, token: TOKEN, voice: VOICE, tts: stext.text};

    jQuery.ajax({
    type: “GET”,
    url: baseUrl,
    data: params,
    error: function() {
    displayMessage(“Nabaztag error : message not sent.”);
    },
    success: function() {
    displayMessage(“Message sent to your Nabaztag.”);
    }
    });
    }
    });

    You just have to fill the 3 constantes (TOKEN, SN and VOICE) at the beginning.

  187. Charles wrote on :

    This is an amazing add-on. This may change the face of the Internet for years to come.

  188. frustrated wrote on :

    Ubiquity does NOT respond to any commands, just sits there dumb when I enter text. Won’t even respond to help. The Bug Tracker is useless, can’t even figure out how to enter or find this as a bug.

    Is it a proxy issue, perhaps?

  189. required wrote on :

    make it contorlable by voice and you have a startrek like interface 😛

  190. molokoloco wrote on :

    Genial !
    We can do anything with this, in less than to letters user find the good action to perform

    Impressive….

    Personnaly, would appreciate un simple way to edit installed commands

    I’m french, it’s took me 10min to find the good file to edit
    “C:Documents and SettingsJulienApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfilesj76eaghz.defaultextensionsubiquity@labs.mozilla.comchromecontentbuiltincmds.js”
    but take min 2min to change main redirection to english sites to the french version of them (especialy wiki, translate, etc..)

    Great, keep the good job o_O

  191. Will wrote on :

    simply amazing. the beta is already incredibly useful, can’t wait for this to come out of the labs

  192. Omarra Byrd wrote on :

    “I will try to use for a couple weeks and then forget about for a year until they add some decent extensions and Roboform”! I feel you Dan, this is why I don’t use the chrome browser. I actually love the RoboForm software myself. I use it all of the time and it takes all of the menial everyday tasks that I have to perform on my computer daily and shortens them extremely! What once took me fifteen minutes to complete now takes me only one second because RoboForm does the same task with just one click. In fact I wrote a Report about a lot of RoboForm’s capabilities for use that aren’t even touched on in the User’s Manual for RoboForm. You can get that Report here:

    http://www.theroboformreport.com

    There is also a FREE version of RoboForm that you can download on this web page, just to test the RoboForm software out for yourself! I highly recommend it!

  193. Jeremy wrote on :

    very good stuff dont know if we can get easy use with it may it need to try hard but seems exciting stuff , just what about security ? it is safe to you Ubiquity and emails etc ? how safe it is ?

    Keep thy good job guys 😉

  194. Dan wrote on :

    Awesome! Love it! WooHoo! Actually useful NOW as opposed to Chrome which is like a trimmed down Opera (ie. something I will try to use for a couple weeks and then forget about for a year until they add some decent extensions and Roboform).

  195. Abhishek wrote on :

    Looks Great !!

  196. Andrew wrote on :

    I love it.
    Unfortunately, after installing it, I find it takes considerably longer for my firefox to start up. This is a deal-breaker for me, but I realise this is only a prototype. I look forward to trying again whne the project is more polished.

  197. Vijay Praveen wrote on :

    Cool!!

  198. ryan taylor wrote on :

    huge ubiquity fail = when I use “this” in a twitter command it doesn’t account for the url link length in the character count. I looked more like an idiot than usual for over tweeting.

  199. clare wrote on :

    ok see that last line i wrote wasn’t suppose to say mozilla labs>> blog archive>>> introducting ubiquity…
    i think the control space tab just doesn’t wanna work for some reason

  200. clare wrote on :

    please HELP!!!
    I’m using a pc
    when I go to press the ctrl space combo instead of your wonderful ubiquity command window poping up, i get an html window full of absolute nonsense. some of which reads :

    Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

    and goes on and on and on.
    i’ve tried reinstalling it, changing the command and nothing seems to work.
    please help!!

  201. JBu92 wrote on :

    Wouldn’t doing definitions from like dictionary.com or something make more sense than from answers?

  202. lgsoltek wrote on :

    I strongly suggest that you cooperate with the author of the Firefox add-on “Devo”! You two are in fact the same idea! Work together and you’ll make it the best!

  203. Serbay wrote on :

    I try to send email to an adress that isn’t in my adress book but i can t do.

    I copy the page make the selection email this to ….. when i enter the command i see my e mail send page but with no e mail adress in “to” part.

  204. Carlos wrote on :

    Oh yeh the looks like some spam got through on this post too. You might want to get rid of those.

  205. Carlos wrote on :

    That is fantastic. As a developer that is very cool. On the general user side though I see it as being still having a developer’s mindset. There are commands that resemble to be too much for developers than general public use.

  206. Leslie wrote on :

    Nice!

    d.mix and Vispedia offer similar, but slightly different use cases for keyword-based and direct manipulation / microformat inspired interactions:

    http://hci.stanford.edu/mashups/ (d.mix)
    http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/vispedia/ (Vispedia)

    One difference is that d.mix and Vispedia’s bookmarklets are modal, so one needs to enable “sampling mode”, to select appropriate elements. While it’s great that Ubiquity allows text selection, what happens when the objects to be selected are more arbitrary DOM nodes as in the d.mix or Vispedia (Wikipedia table) case?

    In any case, great work!

  207. Guido Schetters wrote on :

    would be awesome!
    But thinks like twitter aren’t really used in the Netherlands.. would it be possible to make commands for other communities?
    keep it up!

  208. David wrote on :

    put the ubiquity to run on google chrome (Gbrowser)

  209. Kodiak wrote on :

    Unable to download Ubiquity!

    An error occurred during a connection to services.addons.mozilla.org:443.

    SSL received a record with an incorrect Message Authentication Code.

    (Error code: ssl_error_bad_mac_read)

    and

    An error occurred during a connection to services.addons.mozilla.org:443.

    SSL received a record with an incorrect Message Authentication Code.

    (Error code: ssl_error_bad_mac_read)

  210. Mr-Yellow wrote on :

    Why would I want to include content in email?

    That’s just asking for security exploits, worms etc.

  211. Mr-Yellow wrote on :

    Why would I want to insert content into emails…. That’s just asking for security exploits, worms etc.

  212. lucinaldo pereira da silva wrote on :

    muito bom, posso traduzir paginas na net com um simples comando caras,a pesquisa e muito boa com ubiquity.

  213. Daniel Collins wrote on :

    Wow, this is amazing and will speed up my daily surfing ten fold.

  214. DJBoca wrote on :

    I’m running Server2008 as my workstation and ubiquity 0.1.11 is not installing. It downloads, asks to be installed, appears to install but is not listed in the results box. No request to restart firefox and upon restarting, no add on present.

  215. George Ferguson wrote on :

    You might be interested in work some work along similar lines that is being done at U. Rochester and IHMC in Florida: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/projects/plow/

    The paper “PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent” (available from the website) won an outstanding paper award at AAAI-2007. The browser instrumentation is a Firefox extension (previously Mozilla).

    George

  216. Erland wrote on :

    Hey, just wanted to say how much this rocks. I’ve installed the beta and it’s already really improved my browser experience – I use Gnome Do for almost everything I do on my desktop so this was a fantastic extension of the browser experience. Now I find myself wanting the same functionality in all my apps – “Make this page landscape” in OpenOffice Writer for example – how awesome that would be! It’s still lacking alot I think, but I’m really excited about it’s potential. Thanks.

  217. Tadanobu Sakai wrote on :

    使ってみます

  218. pinyeiro wrote on :

    It could be very helpfull if ubiquity can take screenshots and add it to a email. Could it be done?

  219. Web Design Company USA wrote on :

    Gr8 concept and an amazing idea.

  220. JT… wrote on :

    Fantastic idea I was about to attempt the very same thing now I don’t have to. Great.

  221. ferada wrote on :

    i wanted to see something like this for a long time, keywords on bookmarks were on step, this is the next. cool thing.

    one thing though: i think that integrating the command line with the traditional navigation bar would be better, so that the one additional context is unnessecary.

  222. tehKenny wrote on :

    Idea for next big update: grouping functions. Users select various functions and append a word to them so when you type a word like “post”, functions for Friend feed and tumblr come up. “Search” “Edit” and so-on.

  223. kafka wrote on :

    Great stuff dudes, it’s a killer app for the Beloved FF. I’ll have a look at the development of this project closely. thanks.

  224. flip wrote on :

    i’ve heard that ubiquite 1.1 is out. Where to find the current version? is there a project page?

  225. Noud Maas wrote on :

    This reminds me of the ‘computer’ in Star Trek. 🙂

  226. Ella wrote on :

    This is fantastic! Thank you a million times 🙂

  227. Ryan Li wrote on :

    What’s the copyright status of the ubiquity logo? I want to use it on Wikipedia.

  228. che.satoshi wrote on :

    Good Idea!

  229. Kent wrote on :

    Seems to “tweak” or distort the left side of the iGoogle homepage. Removed Ubiquity and it appears fine now. Strange.

    Kent

  230. Baxter Tocher wrote on :

    Seems to work nicely on the latest beta of Flock too (v2.0b2), on Windows XP at least.

  231. Nenad wrote on :

    I am so impressed, great job! I’m am going to recommend this to all of my friends, i’m so excited to be using this. GREAT JOB!

  232. Mark Stivers wrote on :

    Ubiquity doesn’t work on my computer and also causes Firefox to forget what my home page is.

  233. Vittorio Monaco wrote on :

    I don’t know if someone else told this, but Ubiquity doesn’t like “Fast-dial”.. I mean, “Fast-dial” just stops working after enabling Ubiquity… Is there a solution? Is it a bug? Help, please..

  234. Graphics Related Blog wrote on :

    This is Really AWESOME ..I liked it Very much.

    Thanks !!

  235. lalskj wrote on :

    The moving words in the video thing was sort of nifty if gimmicky the first time I saw someone do it. This is about the fifth time and now it just seems like bad art school video poetry.

    So what does ubiquity, like, do anyway? Can it find porn?

  236. withover.com wrote on :

    Hello,
    This is fantastic!!!
    But there is critical error in Ubiquity.
    After install this, youtube videos was not played!

  237. dreamxcape wrote on :

    hi,
    first, thanx for a great product! ubiquity has definitely revolutionized my web experience.

    any plans to integrate an annotations feature? something like the shared copy? (i’ve been using devo for sometime and i loved the ‘shared-copy’ annotate feature)

  238. Nathan wrote on :

    This is a good example of UI convergence. Reminds me a bit of goosh.org. Now if only I could get unix shell commands.

  239. Guru wrote on :

    I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!

    this is going to be great!

  240. scragar wrote on :

    Is there a way to sort or un-install one or more of the various services? I love ubiquity as a whole, but I hate that when I use m for maps MSN always appears(and why can’t ubiquity learn what’s used more and move it up? If I use maps 100 times and never use MSN it still defaults to MSN first for some reason, why?)

    Sorry for the way this is appearing if you find it demanding, I do understand how much work has gone into the ap, and I must say I’m very impressed with it’s quality(even more so since ubiquity is still in beta).

  241. Filipe wrote on :

    Looks like the ubiquity extension interferes with the functioning of the Pmog extension. I really dont want to uninstall pmog. Can you development guys adress this issue in some future version of ubiquity? Thank you very much Mozilla!

  242. Deepak Kumar Gupta wrote on :

    man this is awesome……firefox is simply going to change the way we interact and use interent at this awesome speed and level of innovation…

    also, it proves beyond doubts the power of open source….

    keep it up guys……love ur work….

  243. Carlos Morales wrote on :

    Excelent job!. This is an amazing feature for everybody. Can`t wait to see its development in the future.
    I suggest you guys to make it work for other languages too (Specially Spanish). It will be a hit.

  244. jon wrote on :

    nice job– and thank you. Ubiquity is very useful and simple.

  245. Barbara Breger wrote on :

    This is one of the most brilliant extensions that I have seen in all of the years that I have used Firefox. I love it and look forward to any and all updates. Bravo!!!!!!!!!!!

  246. orlando_ombzzz wrote on :

    interesting work

    but … a constructive critic:

    why don’t you try to get “print selection” right in Firefox before ? ( still getting blank or garbled pages in a lot of sites … this has been reported at bugzilla lot of times, and still is not fixed )

  247. Sky wrote on :

    Fantastic job. UI needs more work but this has unlimited potential.

  248. Arthur Wiebe wrote on :

    Awesome. It’s exciting to see Firefox improve so well.

  249. Jeff C wrote on :

    Hmms, a command line for the browser. Very nice, ought to see some awesome “herds”.

  250. BlogReviewers wrote on :

    enablis web users to pick up things on the web and put them together in ways never done before will change the way we use the net.

  251. Blacksun wrote on :

    I love this. It has already changed the way I use my browser.

    Simple UI, great potential for development, and if this is just the alpha, the sky is the limit. After Security this is now my #1 must have extension. Brilliant!

  252. Joel wrote on :

    Hi all,
    For those who are thinking that mozilla should pay rights for the name used in behalf of Ubuntu Graphics Installer 😛 remember that the name of this application is related, in fact very well related, with Ubiquitous Computing.
    At first look it seems like a very good and promising application that in a near future we will depend on to do our own web-navigation. Note that in the future (10 years max, if we’re not dead till then) everything will have their ubiquitous part and do part of our daily lives like the cell-phones do today.

    Just my 20cents 😉
    Joel

    PS: More info about Ubiquitous Computing : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing

  253. Raziel wrote on :

    Hey, this is pretty powerful. In general the concept of linguistic UI is something I’m trying to use in the interfaces I’m creating.

    But being somebody that builds on a fully internationalized app., I think it would be very interesting if you guys post an article on how you deal or plan to deal with such challenge.

  254. Gerben wrote on :

    Due to Twitter i’ve seen A LOT lately, think of soocial, lookery, netvibes but this has be the coolest so far!!

  255. Rio wrote on :

    Brilliant. Absolutely Brilliant.

    What i would like to see done with this is a commenting command for Bebo/myspace/facebook.

    The command would go somthing like this:

    Bebo-comment (name of friend) (message)

  256. Bangolio wrote on :

    I installed ubiquity, it made my bookmarks toolbar disappear, I’ve tried everything to get it back, no dice, thanks but i’ll probably try it again in a year or so

  257. Epicanis wrote on :

    Glancing at the tutorial, it looks like a really great idea. Looks like I’ll have to wait until Linux is propertly supported to try it out, though.

  258. mustafa wrote on :

    waiting for google apps support.

  259. Monu wrote on :

    Wonderful. It’s really a nice initiative, which will lead to a change in the web experience.

  260. mikelong wrote on :

    I love it! but my gmail contact can not be found just because my friends’ name is Chinese.Please support Chinese contact in the next version.thanks!

  261. Colum wrote on :

    Shit! thats NICE!

  262. Eric Tan wrote on :

    Absolutely amazing stuff! Next, we’re all gonna see Microsoft ripping it off for IE9, which is gonna be a 2GB install.

  263. alex wrote on :

    wow – this is great! I feel like jashiu: Its almost too good to be true 😉
    I am really excited to see this getting better and better. I have no doubts this will be the next “big thing”..

    I even wrote a little (german) introduction to it on my blog 😉 ( http://lexar.pytalhost.com/2008/08/29/ubiquity/ )

  264. Viktor wrote on :

    very nice indeed

  265. Sam wrote on :

    Genius, absolute genius – can’t wait to see this evolve.

  266. Ameya Bhakay wrote on :

    While this video looks really fancy, for an Indian user, it might not really be very fascinating, given the fact that, things like Google Maps or restaurant reviews are a very uncommon thing here! But this concept is really great!

  267. Pedro wrote on :

    the new, revolutionary and better site to search: http://www.ubiquity.com

    old sites:

    http://www.google.com
    http://www.live.com

  268. Israel wrote on :

    Quem for do Brasil baixe logo a extensão, porque o negócio é espetacular!

    Isso vai revolucionar a internet.

    Ubiquity !!!

  269. David wrote on :

    Ubiquity

    The name of the future!

    spectacular, brilliant, revolutionary.

    Better than Google and Microsoft

  270. Plaag wrote on :

    Great stuff.

    SS soon.

  271. lukas wrote on :

    this is so amazing! great work and great inspiration coming from mozilla labs here. Our development team built a plug-in within hours last night. it allows you to search people data throughout the web via ubiquity/123people.com

    check it out by going to http://www.123people.com you should be prompted to install the add-on.

    hope you like it
    lukas

  272. Dave Hodgman wrote on :

    First up – ABSOLUTELY F#@%^NG LOVE UBIQUITY!!!
    It has immediately changed the way I use the browser forever.

    A couple of concerns:
    – I have created a command file on my local webserver and the new commands are working great. When I update that file, the occasionally Ubiquity box locks up and becomes non-functional requiring a restart of Firefox
    – On the security front, it appears that I can update the command file and the new command comes into force without any notification to the user. This presents a serious security risk. The command I reviewed and subscribed to today may not be the same command I’m running tomorrow. Security risks such as this must be nailed down before Ubiquity can become mainstream.

    Well done guys. Really looking forward to seeing it mature.

  273. MichaelTV wrote on :

    It ran great for a couple hours, then as I was subscribing to new scripts they suddenly all went away. No more commands. Have tried restarting, have tried reinstalling — looks like all the commands are gone for good 🙁

  274. Endolith wrote on :

    [I tried this in Windows and it locked up my computer, so I’m waiting until I have some patience and free time to try it again.]

    I hear that this lets you modify web pages in place. Does it allow you to share those changes with others individually or en masse?

    What I really want is a Firefox extension that changes the entire web into a massive wiki, which anyone can edit and then broadcast their changes to others. You could subscribe to channels, perhaps, like a small channel with friends, so that you can leave notes on a page and when a friend visit the link you sent them, can see the notes.

    You could have large channels with bazillions of subscribers like a spell-checking channel, so you never see a spelling error again, and the changes, once vetted, are queued for transmission (along with an automatically-generated friendly message) to the webmaster of the site (as soon as someone gets around to finding their email address and associating it with the page and channel).

  275. Windy wrote on :

    I’d like to respond to AlsoMike who said it was a bad idea because: “Yes, there’s a minority of web users for whom speed and automation are important, and they already know how to use command line interfaces ….”

    As a “non-minority” person who uses the web but who doesn’t know a damn thing about “command line interfaces,” and doesn’t want to know, I disagree.

    I use the web as a writer/researcher, so I am constantly going to sites, cutting information, pasting it somewhere else (like a text document or an email) so that I can use/rewrite/refer to the information in articles, blogs, emails, etc.

    It the whole cut and copy and paste thing gets very tedious and I think I would use this tool if it were easy to learn, and readily available to me.

    So … GREAT idea. It has a lot of potential. Looking forward to trying it out.

    I think there are a lot of people like me who are not techno-Einsteins who would definitely learn to use it.

  276. Lim wrote on :

    Awesome! I can already think of some really useful uses for this. Thanks for all the work you’ve done.

  277. John Santangelo wrote on :

    love it. this is the most exciting thing i’ve seen in quite a while.

  278. Nelson Winrow wrote on :

    I think you guys will seriously revolutionize the way the internet is used. I know for a fact that I will use it.

  279. rich! wrote on :

    Great start…

    1) Group the commands into individual script files, so that user can install them (aka… greasemonkey style)

    (ie, i want to build a generic amazon search vs just books)

    2) allow users to define the name to call the command (currently editing the builtincmd.js file is cumbersome and changes will be lost)

  280. Rafael Rez Oliveira wrote on :

    Fantastic! It really puts on user’s hand all the web power.

    Incridible simple to use.

    Congrats!

  281. Tom wrote on :

    Couple of things:

    — it would make sense to me to have special keywords for the different web mail services (gmail, ymail, …)

    — what about automatically using the current keyword searches to the set of commands?

  282. vympel wrote on :

    I found no where to report a bug…so i’ll tell that here; i’m really fascinated about Ubiquity but i found that it’s interfering with some addons that i like too !

    the 2 addons are : Fast Dial and Google reader notifier…the first probably does not work enough and the second works but the little pop up can’t be displayed correctly.

    I wish you will correct these bugs and others if exist because i really want to use Ubiquity.

  283. Robi wrote on :

    I also use simple mail, and it does not work (simple mail).

  284. killpack99 wrote on :

    Imagine an OS that had a web browser (say firefox or a derivative of it) entirely, well at least mostly, integrated into it. Web pages are applications, like prism or AIR but…more. Developers can create web sites that can interact with your desktop DIRECTLY (with your permission of course) and do all kinds of amazing things. And on top of that UBIQUITY! Wow.

  285. bostoneric wrote on :

    need to be able to edit the default commands and also some sort of utility to create new simple commands

  286. Harry wrote on :

    Ubiquity is really great, but I believe having this functionality outside of the browser, i.e. Enso, is much more useful. (There’s also the fact that I like Safari … but i’m willing to switch to FF for Ubiquity)

    I hope that you guys continue developing Enso, perhaps bringing it and Ubiquity together so I can use Enso with the best of both worlds

  287. Matt wrote on :

    This is similar to features in IE8 Beta 2. Both were released the same day, but IE 8 calls the commands “accelerators”. You can also choose who should define, map, email, etc. your selected text and images. Very cool stuff on either browser though, it certainly makes things a lot easier.

    I think more control is needed though over how some websites post things, such as Craigslist for instance, I live in Canada and someone was moving to Europe so the maps showed me where they were moving to, and not the location of the items for sale. Even grabbing postal codes would have been perfect for the map function instead of the entire address. But with time, things will improve and I can’t wait.

  288. Josh Atkins wrote on :

    And, oh, thanks for *really, really awesome Ubiquity*! Also, I too believe that this will change the Web — for the better. I’m sure TBL will quickly see the semantic web link with Ubiquity.

  289. Josh Atkins wrote on :

    @Codemonkey Yeah, I too would love to see that — perhaps you guys can incorporate the search keyword functionality that today is in the address bar, obsolete that method, and incorporate it into Ubiquity with a command syntax something like this, for instance: search . Thus removing the need for a command _per search engine_.

    Another feature that would be cool to see is macros — i.e. multiple commands in a sort of ‘Ubiquity batch file’.

  290. Toon wrote on :

    Great work! Would love to see Google Apps for Your Domain support (gmail contacts and calendar are not recognized).

  291. Cena wrote on :

    Ok. Before I was a skeptic of Firefox, but if you guys pull this off…

    You might just make me a believer. O.O

  292. smarks667 wrote on :

    Why is it not you make operating system? Mozilla distro 2010?

  293. Jan wrote on :

    Ubiquity will definitely speed up web navigation. I’m looking forward to commands for all the bigger pages. Blogged: http://www.solvium.de/blog/2008/webnavigation-neu-definiert-ubiquity-fuer-firefox/

  294. wish-itworked wrote on :

    Wish it would work under Ubuntu as I REALLY like it on Windows! Any suggestions???

  295. Eitan Burcat wrote on :

    This thing rock!

  296. alresave wrote on :

    This is the best extension I’ve ever seen. Makes me wonder if this kind of browsing is the near future for browsers. It should be part of default Firefox installation for version 3.5

  297. fleur wrote on :

    hi,
    Shame it interferes with some other add-ons, like hyperwords. Had to uninstall….

  298. Lucas wrote on :

    Looks a lot like Intel’s Mash Maker: http://mashmaker.intel.com

  299. Steve wrote on :

    Very interesting plugin, with huge possibility, this is the web’s next big thing!

  300. Philippe Roy wrote on :

    The processing of natural language is key to the success of this project. Using word-spotting won’t cut it.

    Over the years, I have developed an approach that takes a string of characters expressed in natural language, and transforms it into a concept through predicate calculus. This, to me, seems to be the exact technology that should be used by ubiquity so that users do not have to respect strict rules related to language.

  301. daniel alfonso wrote on :

    es muy interesante y ayudara mucho a evolucionar la red,es necesario y le agradesco a los creadores ustedes impulsan el avance del mundo.

  302. Den wrote on :

    Another exciting page in web history!
    Great!

  303. Milan wrote on :

    This is amazing. I am just thinking what happens if someone hacks your PC, makes a huge network around the world. It will be a real Metrix.

  304. Michael Wassil wrote on :

    I’m running: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070220 Firefox/2.0.0.2

    I’ve tried several separate times to download Ubiquity and each time I get a “download error -228”. I’d like to try this but something’s not working right. Please advise.

  305. San Nayak wrote on :

    This is simply great.. I love mozilla…

  306. XpsypieX wrote on :

    Looks amazing, keep up the good work.

  307. Prathees.R wrote on :

    Wonderful!!! This is gonna change the browsing experience!

  308. Wade wrote on :

    PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE integrate this with Quicksilver!

    http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver

  309. J. Beaman wrote on :

    This is marvelous. This may complete change the way I use the internet on par with buying my first mac and installing quicksilver. Thanks!

  310. Rex wrote on :

    Putting Enso into Firefox can definitely florish in the already keyboard loving developer community.

  311. John Knight wrote on :

    This is a superb extension I love it. This is one of those extension that is really going to change the way I operate the web.

    There have been comments that the command line basis of the system will only attract power users. I think, therefore, you should also be stressing the context menu options. They work incredibly fast, faster, for example, than any other context menu search exxtension.

    I don’t know why you included the word count functionality, but it is really useful for me. So thanks.

    Can you add ‘Merriem Webster’ to the context menu. There is a firefox search box add on for this.

    The ‘send’ function in the maps command doesn’t work for me, instead it only enters the following text in the email body:

    http://maps.google.com/staticmap?markers

    Cheers,
    John

  312. Rivitir wrote on :

    This is Awesome! This has got to be the coolest firefox extension yet!

  313. Yishay Cohen wrote on :

    Great work. I’ll second ‘why didn’t i think of that’.
    some questions: are we back to the command code? and if it is ubiquity, is it also outside the browser? that will be nice…

  314. Damien wrote on :

    Excellent job guys! Would love to see it develop, hopefully I’ll be able to contribute.

    Cheers!

  315. Shirlei wrote on :

    This is simply awesome. It is the first thing in ages that really impressed me! I’ll be looking forward for improvements.

  316. wu wrote on :

    太牛了，山崩地裂。

  317. Fernando wrote on :

    Muito bom!!! Brilhante! Não é à toa que prefiro o Firefox à IE.

    abs

    Fernando from Brazil

  318. worker wrote on :

    great tool!

    thank you!

  319. troublemonger wrote on :

    Tried to use in Firefox in Windows. However, after the box comes up, and i start typong, nothing happens. no suggestions. even pressing enter doesnt make any difference. has anybody seen similar behavious

  320. pckopat wrote on :

    hay daşşağınıza assulayum sizun.
    Helal.

    Thanx a lot

  321. anne wrote on :

    This is like Quicksilver for the web! Awesome!

  322. primoza wrote on :

    FastDial plugin not work when i on ubiquity 🙁

  323. Carl wrote on :

    I jumped on it at once. It really looks awesome and I could wait to test it.

  324. Federico Pistono wrote on :

    Looks *very* interesting. Excellent job with both the idea, realisation and presentation, ove the minimal and intuitive interface.

    Labs’ RSS added for the moment. Keep it up.

  325. Jack Rouse wrote on :

    QUICKSILVER!!!!!!

  326. Tiago Fernandez wrote on :

    Man, this is the best tool I’ve discovered this year so far! I can’t believe nobody never thought on this. Congratulations! 🙂

  327. why reinvent the wheel wrote on :

    Why not Java applets?
    Its all done for ya by crack coders and comp science gurus – all in Java, GPLed – so free and open.
    Also, please see the possibility of connection between the semantic web and this idea:
    http://2stepsback.wordpress.com/2005/08/02/massively-interconnected-distributed-computing-systems/

    Anyway, you guys are doing ultracool, awesome, rocking stuff !
    May the source be with y00!

    PS:
    Next step : visual browsing using 2D graphs – and expanding/contracting circles, spheres, etc.

  328. Amit wrote on :

    Oops!!!
    email to contact, to contact is a nice thing

  329. Amit wrote on :

    Oops!!!
    email to contact1, to contact2… is a nice thing

  330. Sandra wrote on :

    Very good idea. Hopefully you find a way to use it outside the browser window. It’s nice to add a map to gmail, but why not add it to Word, paste it into Photoshop or my non-gmail e-mail client. At the moment it’s a web application, but what I would like to see, is that it becomes almost a part of the OS. I would like to be able to use this easy commands in ever other application.

  331. Amit wrote on :

    email to contact1,contact2,contact3… would be a nice thing

  332. habil bozali wrote on :

    This is amazing. I like it a lot.

  333. Hez wrote on :

    Hell to the KICKASS! Duly blogged at http://cvxn.tumblr.com/post/47656246/suitep-mozilla-labs-introduces-ubiquity-0-1

  334. Erno wrote on :

    Isn’t IE8 introducing something like this called “Accelerators”? So this isn’t an original idea then?

  335. Raju Angani wrote on :

    One heck of an idea, simply genius…

  336. Jon wrote on :

    Interesting idea.
    Less keyboard – more mouse.

    One of the biggest problems in development, in my opinion, that developers develop for developers, and not for non-technical folk.

    Use the mouse.

  337. James Tocknell wrote on :

    Nice, but should interface with the search plugins, not create new ones.

  338. bruno wrote on :

    GREAT!!! keep on developing!

    thanx a lot

  339. Sahibinden wrote on :

    realyy great.
    thanks a lot mozilla.

  340. Rawrl wrote on :

    Does it include commands that make FF3’s interface not suck?

  341. Ethan wrote on :

    this is awesome. i love it already. but just one thing. when you use the email command and if you’ve enabled the https setting in gmail then it just brings you to the inbox. changing the setting back to normal fixes it. other than that things look good.

  342. Zeno wrote on :

    This is like the best thing ever. I want one integrated with Windows.

  343. KC wrote on :

    Pretty good. But, the map function is returning a onbrowserload().referenceerror: geoip_city is not defined.

    I’ll play around some more.

  344. ThatVideoIntroOfFlyingTextIsGAYGAYGAY wrote on :

    …

    …

    Shouldn’t Ubiquity warn you against having lunch with a tool?

    …

    …

  345. Kamal wrote on :

    This is amazing. I like it a lot.

  346. Anand wrote on :

    Great work.
    I always wanted something like this.
    keep it up

  347. Dmitri wrote on :

    Where do I make feature requests? I already have some 😉

  348. Jake Bohall wrote on :

    Fucking AWESOME! Keep it coming

  349. Amazed Firefox (ubuntu) User wrote on :

    This would be 100% more awesome if we could replace the “awesome bar” (or whatever it’s called now) with it!

  350. Senor Afro wrote on :

    I definitely like this idea – but to be perfectly honest, this doesn’t seem to be more than a simple extension which has mapped keywords to selective commands, much like if you mapped shortcut keys to run scripts – im sorry, but im not all that impressed

    what mozilla should be doing is revolutionising the way information is interpreted by the browser itself, thinking of innovative ways to bridge the communication gap between computers and people – not creating a glorified console for ff3

  351. juje wrote on :

    great idea…it’s been five minutes since i downloaded and i’m loving it…keep on the good job…

  352. Timmy wrote on :

    WOW i was very impressed i feel like it is very nice indeed

  353. Erik wrote on :

    Neat idea.

    How do I switch the weather to Celcius? Haha.

    I’m guessing there will be more configuration in the future though, so I’m not discounting this quite yet. Unfortunately it seems to overlap quite a bit with other launchers like Quicksilver – I’d like to see Ubiquity’s functionality plugged into other launchers.

  354. Greg Tangey wrote on :

    While this is handy in Firefox, i can’t help but think it’d be a billion times handier if it were a stand-alone application that allowed me to do most of these things.

    As it stands theres no easy way for me to use things like the map link, because 90% of my email is in outlook.

  355. That’s My Side Boob wrote on :

    OMGz! I love it! It’s still a bit unstable, ie it stops recognizing commands, but I love the idea. One thing I would love to see is a command for Kayak to search for flights and times. Programmers…. Programmers… anyone?

  356. adeonothas wrote on :

    If we can search from a command line built into Firefox(thanks to Ubiquity), do we actually need a homepage? I mean,I’m pretty sure that the average homepage is usually a search engine, like Google for instance, or Yahoo. If they could just type it into Ubiquity, doesn’t that negate the entire purpose of having a homepage in the first place? (not that it’s a bad idea, just something that came to mind while using the prototype.)

  357. Jauhari wrote on :

    Let’s get started 😉

  358. Rob Hayes wrote on :

    I really hope someone makes a command based off of http://www.spreeder.com/index.php

  359. Alex wrote on :

    Awesome, but emailing the Vimeo video to a friend using Ubiquity doesn’t seem to work. Ah well, something for the future, right?

  360. PMOG wrote on :

    Seems to conflict with the PMOG.com extension?
    http://pmog.com/forums/pmog-misadventures/topics/ubiquity-conflict

  361. Ryles wrote on :

    Wow, awesome concepts. One absolutely necessary fullfilment of the idea…

    Voice Command compatable.

    Use mouse keyboard and voice commands in combination to make this whole thing absolutely fly.

  362. web tasarımı wrote on :

    thats awesome very useful thing

  363. John Fouhy wrote on :

    Very impressive! Some comments:

    – an UNDO function. Please! It’s nice to be able to modify web pages in-place, but I’d like to be able to quickly reverse changes.
    – map previews don’t work for me. Not sure why. If I hit enter, it takes me to the google maps page, but the Ubiquity preview just shows an empty box with a blue border. On a Mac 10.4 with Growl installed.
    – it would be nice if we can customize the provided commands. In particular weather: I’d like temperature in degrees celsius 🙂 (and also I’d like to know if the “wellington” it found is the one I live in…)

    (off to read the detailed docs now)

  364. Ryan wrote on :

    i clicked on the link in this page that said install the prototype and firefox prevented the popup window from popping up. that is great… !.!.!.!

  365. Firefox user wrote on :

    Drag and drop the xpi file into the firefox browser……….just for clarification.. not the safari browser.

  366. Tim Liszt wrote on :

    Hmmm. How do you install Ubiquity?

    I downloaded, then double-clicked to install, and the file (ubiquity-0.1.xpi) launches in Flock which of course has no idea what to do with the file.

    Again… HOW do I install Ubiquity into Firefox?

  367. David S. wrote on :

    The dark blue font color in the results is murder. Change it or make it user definable.

  368. Firefox user wrote on :

    Of course we’ve all heard of extensions…. but it’s just a point that most MAC fans are going to think exactly that..

  369. Firefox user wrote on :

    Well I have to say that this is a cool promising program from Mozilla labs. But I do have this one little teeny weeny little question…. Why is Mozilla Ubiquity beeing showcased on labs.mozilla.com being used on SAFARI?? Developers working for Mozilla labs using Safari browsers somehow just doesn’t fit in here ….in a little odd way. Unless they are trying to prove that it works on the Safari browser too then thats cool. But does it also work on IE or *gaasspp! Mozilla Firefox!?!?!

  370. Charlie Brown wrote on :

    First off, this is going to be absolutely amazing once it is up and running to its full capacity.

    Now for a quick question – I chat on a political chat room, the entire room is in flash. After installing the alpha version I tried to bring it up in the room. It doesn’t appear, will this function be made use-able in flash pages?

    Again, good idea I’m looking forward to seeing this thing take off.

  371. Kevin wrote on :

    This is truly amazing. As I watch the video of this concept, totally stunned me.

  372. Ben Lovell wrote on :

    So, scriptable services esque NeXTStep, and executable commands anywhere, esque Archy. Awesome.

  373. saum wrote on :

    I was enable to search this via the “add-ons” from the tool menu, or from the main Mozilla website…. is this still unavailable being in the beta testing stage?? – But now as I have found and played around with this – its awesome….

  374. Cesar Santamaria wrote on :

    Totally amazing. I just hope this time the full source code can be available, because Humanized couldn’t get out the Enso one.

    Besides that, its awesome! You are truly innovating in web apps; congratulations to all the MozLabs team!

  375. Bert wrote on :

    This is vulnerable to uncontrolled expansion – that is, you’ll find that Ubiquity will become a kind of “shell” for Firefox and will eventually need its own language and syntax dictionary. This will only weigh down the browser even more and we’ll be back at square one.

    And more work for developers. Now we can’t just write a Firefox Search Plugin for our website – we have to write a Ubiquity search, too!

    And then there’s the data source. What happens if Google and other companies go bust or decide to stop serving their APIs? The program would be useless. There’s a bigger picture here, but this app misses it.

    A novel idea, but I’m not sure about it yet.

  376. tudza wrote on :

    Somebody want to explain how to do something with this that I thought it would make simple.

    Open a Gmail compose email window

    Use Ubiquity to look up something in Google, paste the URL for it into the email

    Look up a related reference on Wikipedia and paste the URL for that into the same email.

    So far, all I get is new tabs in Firefox. I might just as well have used tabs instead of Ubiquity. The integration with Google Maps is certainly smooth, just lick on the link and it’s in your email, why isn’t something simpler as easy?

  377. Doug wrote on :

    Is it just me, or does this seem a lot like Wundrbar?

  378. Raúl wrote on :

    Es una prueba de que no sólo lo grande lo hace microsoft

  379. Coder Keitaro wrote on :

    And to think that I was impressed with the Awesomebar in Firefox 3.

    This just buries it.

    I am stunned.

    To those finding the lack of menus an irritation.
    You have to type in a search page, using natural language, to find something and this is just a similar concept.
    If a search engine was just a list of categories within categories, and then finally links that you were forced to use the mouse to navigate you would never, ever, find anything.

    Different input devices are useful for different tasks in different contexts.
    In this context, binding together disparate web applications into a cohesive whole, a keyboard, and natural language keywords, trumps a mouse, with its associated many many submenus, for effectiveness and speed.

    To the dev team:

    Keep up the good work!

  380. Uğur ÇELENK wrote on :

    Great.! I love it.! Thanks mozilla developers 😉

  381. Jackson West wrote on :

    All of these have been done before. And Vysr and yahoo had already started implementing this stuff. perhaps you
    can just write a natural language interface to that FireFox extension if
    that is important like powerset.

  382. yct wrote on :

    Awesome idea, keep it up!
    TAB could be used to autocomplete the typed commands.

    Lazybone & others: Stop whining about mouse menus. Finally learn to touch-type. How do you want to add a calendar entry with mouse? It’s much faster to type ‘wiki’ than have to look it up among 30 textual entries.

  383. Lazybone wrote on :

    Nice idea, pholks!

    I saw someone else stating the obvious and I wanna second that: Command-Line??? Hello? Back to DOS or what? what do I have a mouse with contextual-menus for?

    It’d be sooo easy to implement these commands into contextual menus. I don’t wanna type a command. I want to use my mouse – period! What’s the problem with highlighting a word, right-click on it and choose «wikipedia» from the menu? what’s wrong with having a map on my screen, right click on it and choose «mail this to» or just simply «copy» and then «paste» it into the email-body?

    You guys are on the right path – but this is FAR from being user-friendly…

    I’ll keep an eye on it, though 🙂

  384. Trev wrote on :

    I’m a big convergence fan and with this app all I can say is “Watch-out the floodgates are open”! Kudos!

  385. Matt wrote on :

    A very neat idea! Hope to see better Linux support soon.

  386. noyb wrote on :

    I can see the advertising abuses already…

  387. Corey wrote on :

    I’m amazed as how useful the alpha version already is. Keep up the good work. It’s just like Launchy (QuickSilver, ect) for my browser!

    The gears are turning, and i’m looking forward to adding some new commands.

  388. Takuan Daikon wrote on :

    It would sure be nice if visiting a page that publishes Ubiquity commands didn’t pop up that annoying notice even when you’ve already subscribed to the commands on that page.

    I assume this is ‘coming soon’?

    In any case, great job, guys!

  389. okolnost wrote on :

    I’ve just tried it and it’s nothing but incredible. Can’t wait what can be done with it in future.
    Thanks a lot guys for such ideas! *THUMBS UP*

  390. bilgisiz wrote on :

    fantastic !!!

  391. Matt Torres wrote on :

    This is web 3.0 right here

    You guys make this able to go across different programs and I think we might have a revolution on our hands 🙂

  392. User wrote on :

    Whoever does the voiceover for the demo needs to work on sounding less arrogant. “Win” indeed.

  393. pickupjojo wrote on :

    Is it possible to use the send command with Gmail?
    Thanks!

  394. Parag wrote on :

    Using a Mac OSX 10.4 with Firefox3

    Get following error when clicking on Preferences under Extensions menu for Ubiquity:

    File Not Found

    Firefox can’t find the file at chrome://ubiquity/content/ubiquity.xul.

  395. Rob wrote on :

    I’m logged into gmail but like others it apparently can’t access my accounts. I type: email hello to bob

    and ubiquity says:
    Creates an email message to undefined with these contents:hello to bob

  396. Moogle Gullwing wrote on :

    Suggestion:

    It would be nice if the translation, which I must mention is fantastic, could support Romaji, etc. That is, the romanized versions of Asian languages.

    So for example, instead of using Kanji it could recognize the words in their romanized form. For example:

    こんにちは would be: “Konnichiwa” in Romaji.

  397. a firefoxer wrote on :

    How did you made this video, I am interested, thanks.

  398. b352 wrote on :

    quicksilver

    🙂

  399. Jim wrote on :

    Blogged it here: http://developer.navteq.com/showBlogDetails.do?messageId=8076

  400. Diamonds wrote on :

    I’m loving this 🙂 Lets see IE copy that…

  401. Pedre Wilson wrote on :

    Woah, that’s amazing! It’s like this option should have been included with internet browsers from the start! It’s on the scale of the revolutionisation of the iPhone apps such as mail,calander etc, but 100 times more sophisticated!

    Great work! Can’t wait till Beta/full release. Bookmarked this page!

  402. Charles wrote on :

    I’ve installed Ubiquity, and everything seems to work properly except when I use the enter key. Nothing happens when ever I use it, except about 1% of the time it’ll work properly. What could the problem be, and is there any way to fix it?

  403. Kevin Liu wrote on :

    this is web 3.0

  404. Juansc wrote on :

    I´ve sent a mail with a map to a hotmail´s user any he told me that he can´t see it. Does he need Firefox to watch the maps??

  405. pe7er wrote on :

    Very interesting!

    I was already a Mozilla FireFox fan because of its stability and huge range of extensions.

    Now Ubiquity might be another reason for non-FireFox users to switch over 🙂

  406. Derek Keats wrote on :

    This is pretty neat. As an educator, I can see that this way of doing things has tremendous potential in enabling people learning to create personal learning environments and opportunities. Pretty awesome.

  407. Sidharth wrote on :

    One of the most amazing demos. Robert Scoble called Photosynth the Demo of the Year 2006 and he will probably call this the demo of the year – 2008. Amazing

  408. Pete Weldon wrote on :

    OK, everyone who likes this idea should try http://www.activewords.com.

    ActiveWords is extensible, programmers can build agents that carry out specific tasks.

    ActiveWords is truly ubiquitous, it works in every Windows context (not just in the browser).

    Let’s take this idea and make it universal.

  409. Pauli Marttinen wrote on :

    So if I want to twit “I learned a new word today: this”, it replaces the “this” with the real thing. This make me understand that “this” words are always replaced with real things. What about when I need the word “this” as it is? Should I escape the word?

  410. Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri wrote on :

    also I must say I use bookmark keywords and custom search engines extensively. It actually look like Ubiquity only that Ubiquity overlays and streamline the result.

    Interesting concept. I wonder if it shouldn’t be transparent and part of the address bar or inline search.

  411. Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri wrote on :

    I like the general idea esp. when/once combined with microformats.

    Being an Opera user, the lookup & translation examples aren’t convincing as you can middle click a word or select a phrase and right click, then click Dictionnary or Encyclopdia or Search with > any of your search engine or Translate > pick the src-dst language.

  412. Chris wrote on :

    does it interact with thunderbird?
    like for example, say i wanted to meet a friend at a cafe, and i wanted to include a map…can i get ubiquity to insert a map in thunderbird instead of gmail?

  413. Far wrote on :

    Sounds good! Too bad everytime i try to download it nothing happens!

  414. Vinicius wrote on :

    Great! Awesome! Huge!
    Don’t have words to describe!

  415. Takuan Daikon wrote on :

    One note, though… Some of the commands will totally freak out FireKeeper, and in some cases FireKeeper will interfere with operation so dramatically that it must be temporarily disabled. I discovered this when, for kicks and grins, I decided to see what my command-in-development would do when the user enters html tags, and ended up in this bizarre loop with FireKeeper.

    Still… And for an alpha, excellent work!

  416. Takuan Daikon wrote on :

    Wow! Just… Wow!

    I absolutely love it. The user flow is nice and easy, it’s powerful, and extensibility is just frikken awesome.

    Within a little less than an hour, by following the guide, I was able to create and (mostly) debug a niche command (only of interest to Second Life users) and put it on my website to share with others.

    I’m ecstatic. Of all the Firefox add-ins, this is in my top-10 list of favorites, alongside Firebug and other ‘must-haves’.

  417. Premjith Achem veettil wrote on :

    Really helpful mashups…….

  418. Code Flu wrote on :

    Yep installing this right now!

  419. Adil wrote on :

    I have to agree with John on this one. When I hear the word Ubiquity, it reminds me of the Ubuntu installer. Perhaps a different word might be better suited to describe this project or, maybe, I am just too nerdy 😉

  420. Dan wrote on :

    Mozilla stole my blog name!

  421. Sebastian wrote on :

    Brilliant! I love it… Now just integrate it with google apps email!

  422. Kaleberg wrote on :

    The first thought that comes to mind is that Ubiquity would be a good way to navigate those complex, high security financial sites. If I want to see my account balances or what not, I usually have to wade through the initial page, a log in page, a security check page, a primary account page and then finally my balances. If nothing else, this is tedious. If I want to download information, it is even worse. I might have to go through a dozen pages. It looks like Ubiquity offers a way around other people’s bad site design.

    I should point out that there are limits to a “natural language” interface. I actually worked on an NL interface called Muse back in the late 1960s, back when Citibank was still First National City Bank and ran PDP 10s and SDS 940s. The problem is the same as it is with Applescript. If it looks like English, or some other language, the temptation is to treat it like natural language, with omissions, paraphrases, ambiguities and so on. Unfortunately, the underlying language is much more precise. I’ve actually given up on Applescript, at least until someone writes a formal computer language front end for it. Right now, I just keep having to paraphrase and pray. (I’m not alone. Every Applescript programmer eventually runs into some fantastic dictionary and context problem that changes their awareness of reality.)

    Rather than parsing “natural language”, consider parsing something more stylized that can be described and learned easily. Having a simple verb based language with simple VOM (verb-object-modifier) form could make things much easier from a user point of view. It might not be English or Dari, but any reasonably intelligent person can learn it. Remember, this is a language for giving orders, imperatives, not writing love poetry.

    You might also consider using some tagging convention to get around the quoting problem. Rather than trying to perfectly figure out the natural syntax, just allow, or even require, modifiers to be followed by some marking character, for example a colon. That way, the user doesn’t have to know EVERY possible modifier to determine how to quote their text.

    I’ll keep following Ubiquity. If it works out, I may even try moving to Firefox, yet again. (I’ve tried four or five times, but it just doesn’t match Mozilla or Seamonkey for reliability or functionality.)

  423. Brajeshwar wrote on :

    This looks awesome.

    However, here is a small glitch. When I tried to setup “Preference” for Ubiquity, your local Flash SWF is trying to get some content from “bitcast.vimeo.com” which I think is your tutorial video.

    I’m on Flash Player 10.0.2.26 and there have been a recent Security policy change with the upcoming Flash Player 10 that might be affecting it.

    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10_security_changes.html#head4

    One can go to the “Settings” at macromedia.com and allow local files to access across the internet.

    Just letting you know if you can work around this irritant.

  424. Sebastian wrote on :

    Also, JAMES – that already exists. It’s called Quicksilver.

  425. Sebastian wrote on :

    Don’t get me wrong, this is a brilliant idea. And it’s surely going to save people lots of time, and that – in the end – is the goal of technology. But why do you have to call them MASHUPS?? DJs who make mashups are lame. Why must you adopt this dated and hyped word??? Please stop using it!!!

  426. IPTVGuy wrote on :

    Sounds really cool.. hope this becomes another great tool to kill IE..

  427. Brie wrote on :

    Wow, this looks amazing. Fantastic work. I love Mozilla!

  428. Praneet Mokkapati wrote on :

    Its awesome.. Can’t wait to try it out.

  429. James wrote on :

    Brilliant! However this really should be implemented at a HIGHER level than the web browser. Imagine being at your computer and being able to enter “commands” to tell the operating system to do things. Copying files, searching for files, etc. Now tie these “commands” together into a quick interface that has a built in mechanism for sharing data, something like a tube or a pipe that connects two taps… brilliant brilliant stuff.

  430. Neil Dennis wrote on :

    Fantastic news – Ubiquity looks awesome and will be a very useful addition.

  431. Neil Dennis wrote on :

    Fantastic news and this is going to be so useful!

  432. Daniel wrote on :

    Is Enso still being developed then? Will it support the same Ubiquity extensions?

  433. Boblodiablo wrote on :

    This tech will change the world. Think about how we do things now. Incorperate this UI into a fucking OS already. Why have to use multiple programs when you can use one that does everything? I can see where developer software would conflict, but with this sort of thing will come an exponential growth in how we do things on the computer. The computer will become fun to use again, alot of people who cant comprehend how to do complex tasks will become empowered with this stuff. Get it going ASAP. All we need to do now is incorperate cyberization. So my mind can interact directly with a computer.

  434. luca wrote on :

    good

  435. rodriguez wrote on :

    Very nice ideas, but it is nothing magic. Should be useful for a lot of people though – but not in every case, and not for everybody.

  436. Ryan wrote on :

    Report a bug feature off of this website is through an error 500 …

    Anyways, my bug is that when loading Ubiquity with FF3, my bookmarks tool bar goes away, and it does not properly reload the tabs that I had opened… after uninstalling it, bookmarks came back, and the tabs that i had before I installed showed up..

    Other than that, great idea!

  437. Codemonkey wrote on :

    This could just about change the internet.

    Someone mentioned everyone becoming lazy – just tell your manager it’s streamlining your work for maximum efficiency.

    There are a few things lacking, but this *is* 0.1 so there is plenty of time for improvement. A few more command words, an easy way to add your own websites for searching on – but given time these will be created.
    Maybe a central page showing the best user commands, with some sort of voting system/comments to say what it conflicts with, etc.

  438. Justin wrote on :

    This is the first time I’ve ever gotten excited over a Firefox extension. You’ve just made so many common tasks incredibly fast to execute.

  439. Chris M wrote on :

    @Tony To fix the Fast Dial display issue just upgrade to the newest X build (2.x) http://userlogos.org/extensions/fastdial. I had the same problem (has to do with the use of about:blank in Fast Dial) but this fixed it.

  440. Dominic wrote on :

    Stunning. This is going to be huge. Or at least hugely useful for a small group of users.

  441. Nic wrote on :

    Not usually a big fan of most concept ideas but I really love this one and can’t wait to be able to use it.

  442. Matthias wrote on :

    Hey very very cool stuff!!

    A question, is it possible to change the translator language?

    Thx for than

  443. James wrote on :

    also, it only opens up the email pane of gmail when you don’t have gmail already open in another tab

  444. JT wrote on :

    The gayist thing Ive ever seen, don’t you lot have real lives?

  445. James wrote on :

    Really good prototype. The email’s a bit funny tho. At first it kept just writing the html instead of rich text, but now it’s working ok. don’t like how it forms the emails sometimes and would be great if it could actually send simple emails straight from the interface without having to open up gmail (like how it does twitter). anyway, good work. can’t wait for more updates

  446. Florent wrote on :

    Woaw, a real shift in web browsing! Bravo!
    Waiting for Hotmail integration!

  447. milan wrote on :

    Some of the most innovative ideas I’ve seen in the last year. Congratulations!

  448. Chris wrote on :

    @alsomike: I think you’re missing the bigger picture. Yes the examples like tinyurl and twitter are very “early adopter” scenarios, but if you were to add voice recognition into the mix then your looking at the start of the voice enabled internet. Your grandma may not want to do “command-shift” and know the right context when to right click, but I’d bet she’d like it if she turned on the computer and said “Find me some place I can complain about the Internet.” and Google’s created an I’m Feeling Lucky script that instantly pops up internethaters.com. Or she says “Can you look for Mary Jones? I went to grade school with her. I want to apologize for killing her cat 80 years ago.” And a Classmates.com widget find her classmate, finds she’s been active on their site for years and opens a message window that already has prepopulated “I want to apologize for killing your cat.” Your system’s current voice recognition can’t do this because it has no context to put the instructions in and no logic to carry out the commands. This puts both in the hands of the individual websites that know their context and know their own business logic. This is just another step in moving webservices closer to the client with a different interaction other than a Flash or HTML based ui.

    My concern is there are already several applications out there like this, and each time the websites that want to capitalize on them they have to rewrite the wheel, there’s no standardized interface. This is another proprietary script you’ll need to maintain and update. While I detest waiting 14 years for the 0.1 spec for this to come out from the W3C, there may need to be some kind of informal coalition created to develop some kind of standardized API for these contextualized webservice clients (and please leave room for voice). I say this because when it gets popular, both Microsoft and Apple will develop their own interfaces into safari and ie.

  449. Chris Papadopoulos wrote on :

    This is a really neat project. I hope it takes off. However, I doubt asking people to type commands is a really understandable solution to the non-computer-nerd segment of the population.

    I’d recommend taking a look at Apple Mail’s Data Detectors for inspiration towards a different approach. For example, whenever a date is automatically detected in Mail, hovering over it presents an option menu that allows you to perform related actions such as creating a new iCal event with that date pre-selected.

    It should work the same way in a web-browser. Highlighting text should alter the types of available commands in a contextual menu.

    Here’s an example of how things might work.

    Say you’re reading a message board and somebody wrote, “Hey, did you guys hear that Linkin Park is playing at the Spectrum on Sept. 27th? I love that song of theirs My December. I can’t wait for that!”

    Highlighting that bit of text, the system should quickly process it, and give you a menu that presents a few different options.

    * a Wiki link for the music artist (the system should be intelligent enough through various grammatical cues and perhaps a quick wiki/google search)
    * a link to the ticket purchase site
    * plane tickets to Philadelphia (the system should be intelligent enough to realize that the Spectrum is in Philadelphia and you live far enough away to justify plane tickets
    * create a new calendar event
    * A Map of the region
    * An Email this link
    * A youtube link to that song’s video.

    This approach is definitely not as powerful as a command-line type system, but probably much more usable for the average person.

    Implementing this well is obviously a really hard problem to solve though. But I think this ubiquity project is definitely a large step in the right direction. I like this project right now but I really love where it could go within a year or two if this other approach is taken.

  450. Wade wrote on :

    Other than UI implementation, how is this the same/different than IE 8 Activities? Will it support the same schema?

  451. J.P. wrote on :

    Awesome. I’ll (of course) miss this in all my other apps. I’d use Enso, but my Caps Lock key is currently serving Control key duty (and I like it that way!).

    Anyway, I like the zoom command. I’ve never seen a Firefox extension that zooms the *entire* interface.

    /me still wish Windows had on-the-fly font DPI switching like Linux (or at least Gnome/GTK) has.

    — J.P.

  452. jon wrote on :

    This is great! Would it be possible to allow users to define their own keys in the next version? I’d rather hit tab to scroll through the commands than the down arrow.

  453. Flornet wrote on :

    Just installed it and now my firefox dies at launch!!! Not nice at all!!!

  454. alessio marziali wrote on :

    Brilliant!

  455. plolio wrote on :

    nice, but i don’t like to type shit. clik, clik, clik. mouse. use it. put all that shit on the second mouse button, muse scroll > choose click use. yep im lacy.

  456. Jim wrote on :

    Brilliant! This is amazing.

  457. Ricardo Panaggio wrote on :

    Fantastic! It’s one of those things I wanted a lot in a browser!

    It’s the most interesting and the easiest way to extend the browser at all!

    As soon as I finish work here, I’ll create my own verbs.

    Congrats! Mozilla, as always, is improving the way we browse, and so the way we live.

  458. jojo wrote on :

    Very innovative!

  459. Liz Phillips wrote on :

    So, I am a neophyte, yes, but I am also a Mac user and I when I tried to download I got a message saying I don’t compatibility with my Mac. Is that the case? I’d love to test drive this thing.

  460. henry wrote on :

    very interesting. just installed and im gonna play around with it. video of it looked great

  461. Simisani Takobana wrote on :

    This is just crazily amazing!I can’t write anything anymore, I am still in shock!

  462. Kevin wrote on :

    I guess I just don’t see an overall need for this, but can’t the resources being put into this, be put into something more useful? Like fixing more security holes and optimizing speeds even more?

    The opening paragraph, explaining the steps to set up a lunch date with someone. Oh no! a few extra clicks! The horror! Links only, not the actual text and pictures, oh no, how ever shall we coordinate, we have to do all this clicking and reading for ourselves.

    We’re already becoming exponentially more lazy and expecting computers to do everything for us. We don’t need more ‘advances’ to push this along.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love computers, I’m a computer scientist, they are my life. But I don’t expect them to, nor do I want them to, interpret my every need.

  463. CCS wrote on :

    I have used ubiquity for only five minutes and can not go back to not using it. Congratulations on a fantastic tool!

  464. Gurmit Singh Shakhon wrote on :

    This looks and sounds amazing although I believe it will be quite hard for some users especially beginners, to understand the key terms used to perform a task. It will be very interesting to see how you form the semantic relationships which define those tasks into an easy to understand and cognitive fashion.

  465. Khurrum wrote on :

    Excellent work! I’ve already started using this and am finding it wonderful.

  466. asaaki wrote on :

    Lovely. Lots of potential. Now overtake the IE market already, I can’t wait.

  467. RAM wrote on :

    It’ sounds great! I’ll test it asap.

  468. Anon wrote on :

    You’re thinking outside of the box, when others are thinking status quo.

  469. teristam wrote on :

    I’ve just tried it out. It is absolutely fantastic!!! Hope it can get into the next release of Firefox!

  470. Erik Helin wrote on :

    Wow, this is amazing! I will definitely try to develop some commands.

  471. webmage wrote on :

    Good job Aza – yet another great idea! I think you’re on to something with the whole notion of a web-tool for everything.

  472. Petrea Stefan wrote on :

    This looks like a very very nice tool 🙂
    Ofcourse as previously said it is similar to greasemonkey but it is probably easier to use.

  473. Moody Loner wrote on :

    Superb – far far more useful than the desktop version of something similar to this (jeez for the life of me I can’t remember or find the name of the app, but it does a similar thing for the desktop)

    Outstanding!!

  474. Peter da Silva wrote on :

    What are you talking about? I add maps to email all the time. Not links, maps. Bring up the map, click on grab or hit the grab area hotkey, sweep out the map, go back to the mail program, hit paste, it’s done.

    What, you can’t do that on Windows?

    Oh, well, that’s a different problem.

  475. Chris wrote on :

    Any thought of some type of Facebook integration ?

  476. Pravesh wrote on :

    Great……This is going to change the dimension of user experience.
    Just 2 thoughts for now:
    a) Will it be browser independent…-:)
    b) Same user experience has to be taken out of realm of web and should be used for all type of applications.

  477. ujjwal wrote on :

    brilliant,Amazing…
    you guys are rocking just doing a superb job .. keep it up !!! great work done.

  478. twotimesbaby wrote on :

    the logo looks like the Ubisoft logo. also the name!

  479. J wrote on :

    Absolutely great! Great potential, awesome idea!

  480. Matheus E. Muller wrote on :

    What can I say? Ground-breaking. This really has a lot of potential, and it’s quite easy to write your own commands too. I bet there will be a lot of them everywhere, in just a few days.
    Keep it up guys!

  481. Adam Byrtek wrote on :

    Very promising project! Great that it’s open source from the beginning, unlike Quicksilver which is slowly declining due to stability problems and lack of new releases (even though the core has been opened recently). I’m already addicted to Ubiquity, I think it’s already better than Quicksilver when it comes to cooperation with the web.

  482. Lee wrote on :

    Genius….I’ve never been so motivated to donate my time as a developer as I am now. I guess I have some reading to do 🙂

  483. Owen Cutajar wrote on :

    I’ve just gone ahead and installed it to give it a try. The video looks great and I think it’s a great step forward is making the Web more useful for everyone.

    Blogged about it here: http://www.u-g-h.com/2008/08/27/natural-language-in-your-browser/

  484. Abi wrote on :

    @Natanael L HAHA. I wrote Devo and I’ve been contributing to Ubiquity for a while now. =)

  485. Jon Purkis wrote on :

    This looks incredible. You guys at Mozilla are doing great things to improve our online worlds. I can’t wait to try it!

  486. sanbikinoraion wrote on :

    I’m surprised to not see YubNub on the inspirations list, since this looks like the logical progression of that.

  487. erichansa wrote on :

    good job. it is very useful in the future.

  488. Martyn Parker wrote on :

    I use the Simple Mail extension and this kills it

  489. Peter Lanado wrote on :

    Brilliant work.

  490. Piyush Gupta wrote on :

    Wonderful …love it

    cam to know abt it through Twitter

  491. Piyush Gupta wrote on :

    WOnderful…
    got to know abt it through Twitter/mba_piyush

  492. ridim wrote on :

    UBER COOL!

    very nice thing to have

  493. alsomike wrote on :

    Wow, this is a terrible idea! How could you have possibly come up with it?

    “This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web.”

    Oh wait, I see where you went wrong. Do you see it too? That’s right… this kind of interaction is not even remotely common on the web. Ask mom: “Mom, you know how you are always bugging me about how it’s so hard to create on-demand, user-generated mashups?”

    Yes, there’s a minority of web users for whom speed and automation are important, and they already know how to use command line interfaces, so this will work for them. If this is your intended audience, then hats off to you, sir! Otherwise, this is another bad idea that began with “If only people were software developers like me, they would be so much better off!”

  494. stephan petzl wrote on :

    Its really, really great but:
    has anybody considered that this response-on-typing feature (autocomplete) lets say with wikipedia’s or google’s APIs has a ecological aspect too? millions of users will use these features. on every hit there will be a request across the globe, which costs some energy. (i know there is caching, however,…)
    i am a techfreak too and i would love to see this project growing, but i never read about these issues, and i am wondering if these aspects are considered too at mozilla labs.

  495. Natanael L wrote on :

    Heard about Devo?

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8179

    You should *REALLY* cooperate! A combination of this and Devo would be awesome!

  496. degis wrote on :

    Simply awesome. Will be using this alot!

  497. Pierre wrote on :

    This is great!

    But there is a problem; the email is not an efficient environment to communicate about maps, reviews or any other microformat. Here is a solution (Google example):

    http://bonte-pierre.blogspot.com/2008/04/user-interface-for-google-contents-and.html

    This could be done by the browser too.

  498. 360view wrote on :

    what about mobile access?

  499. Corg0 wrote on :

    The idea is great, but why do I have to type so much? Its so time cosuming …
    Life is short bro

  500. sharvari wrote on :

    Exciting stuff!

  501. Gary wrote on :

    Great stuff guys! Keep up the good work.

    I will certainly be following this closely!

  502. corrie wrote on :

    Wow!!!!!!! Excellent. This is exactly the condensation of activities I always perform. I’m looking for houses and cars at the moment, and this tool is saving me tons of time via custom car spec checks, price comparison checks, and the “built in” map command.

    This is superlative!

  503. Régis Kuckaertz wrote on :

    I’ve just installed Ubiquity and give it a try for a few minutes… it’s a pure bliss, just every repeating task I always found completely useless seems to vanish in the air. YEAH!

    Thank you very much, it’s like (ShortWave+Twitterific+Gmail+…)^1K

  504. kenbeyond wrote on :

    Wow,looking for this.
    This is absolutely great!

  505. joren wrote on :

    wauw, this looks really amazing!
    can’t wait to try this out!

  506. Christopher wrote on :

    This is awesome. I was skeptical at first about the usefulness of something like this, then I actually tried it….. just simply amazing. And the best part: it doesn’t slow down my computer at ALL!

    I don’t know how you managed that, to keep it from slowing down the computer, but you must be gods at coding.

  507. Yves wrote on :

    I love it !
    This is amazing for a first alpha =)

  508. marnix wrote on :

    great experiment! nice to see. Normally i used print screens of things you mentioned, like maps or other web services… this is far more easy!!!

    i would love to see an integration in Thunderbird!

  509. Tony wrote on :

    Oh, I found the bug site, but I can’t file a new ticket there…

  510. Nick wrote on :

    Why didn’t I think of this?

  511. Tony wrote on :

    Hello,

    Amazing utility, Aza.

    I’ll report one bug: It makes FastDial add-on to not show its screen.

    (where do I file that bug?)

    Thanks

  512. Subhash wrote on :

    Amazing!! Looking forward to play with it..

  513. HART (1-800-HART) wrote on :

    @Bjorn Tipling’s comment is quite interesting … “trying to become the emacs of web browsers”.

    I had to convert all my email accounts to GMAIL because I was unable to keep both my email client and firefox open for more then 2-3 hours before rebooting and getting the white screen. Although, I prefer it now .. is not relevant 🙂

    But, that’s an interesting video and can see some useful applications .. and would also second @free stuff’s suggestion … “write a book “Mozilla’s ubiquity for dummies””

  514. Jigar Shah wrote on :

    Absolutely stunning. Can we utilize Awesome Bar for this ?

  515. Felipe Gatica wrote on :

    Nice project. Any chance that supports any other languague like spanish?

  516. Wendy wrote on :

    Impressive. It’s like a fantastic combination of YubNub and my favorite FF extensions all rolled up into one delicious package.

    I look forward to seeing what people come up with for Ubiquity.

  517. Brian Smith wrote on :

    Amazing… Just amazing. Keep up the great work!

  518. Bjorn Tipling wrote on :

    Not to be a dick, but you guys make a decent simple browser, it starts to get used and mozilla cashes out via google ads. Next thing you know you bloat it up, and start dumping one dumb feature after another into it. I thought the goal of Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox was to take all the junk out of Mozilla (email, irc chat, etc) and just make a streamlined browser. You know you lost me, I’m using Safari now. It isn’t trying become the emacs of web browsers

  519. grah! wrote on :

    brilliant work. a few bugs, but this is an outstanding 0.1!

  520. Amit Kapoor wrote on :

    Guess who will envy stuff like this in their apps? Everyone but Mozilla! 😉

    Ubiquity rocks!

  521. Wil wrote on :

    hmm, for some reason, when i type

    email this to chris

    ‘to chris’ appears at the end of the preview (aka part of the message) and pressing enter does exactly that, leaving the To field empty. am i missing something?

  522. Jafon Hakkinen wrote on :

    amazing, it’s quicksilver or the lesser spotlight for the new computer, the browser. now we need to get this to work with flash. or rather flash to work with everything else.

  523. Jacob Mathai wrote on :

    Good Idea.

  524. syed shahul hameed wrote on :

    Great idea and a great concept.

  525. Sebastien Plisson wrote on :

    Excellent.
    Ubiquity will be soon everywhere 😉

  526. seo tips wrote on :

    Absolutely awesome, I love this thing already

  527. tenthead wrote on :

    Most of these stuff can be achieved by bookmarklets and greasemonkey ?

  528. Torley wrote on :

    Ooh, video tutorial from Aza — I watched just the beginning so far but look forward to viewing the whole thing, and understanding better!

    Aza, how was the video made? I like the part in the beginning where the text syncs to your words. 🙂

  529. Paul wrote on :

    Aza, great work – this really blew me away – downloaded and installed 🙂

  530. Cybergrunt wrote on :

    This really rocks. I’ve been using it all morning. It’s kind of like the Hyperwords extension that I have been using a lot but I think this will be much better.

  531. Gabriel wrote on :

    Is this kind of like a sophisticated Gnome Do but for Firefox?
    http://do.davebsd.com/

  532. Jeremy Latham wrote on :

    Wow! All I can say is Wow! Great job – looking forward to seeing this mature.

  533. Gluegl wrote on :

    Kudos! Mozilla Labs team is the undisputed web-apps/browser innovative leader.

  534. Steve borsch wrote on :

    Let me echo the “awesome” and “good job” comments by others…I agree.

    There is so much at our fingertips that feel too time consuming to bother accessing, collating and delivering. Like Quicksilver, I can see this quickly becoming ‘table stakes’ to be in the game for a power user.

  535. Lalo Martins wrote on :

    Awesome.

    When is it getting speech recognition? 🙂

  536. Chris wrote on :

    This is shaping up to be a very good program, even in this very early stage.

    I’ve noticed the translate feature has a rather large flaw from my limited time with it, however; the program does not recognize letters with umlaut from German/Swedish etc: Ä/ä Ö/ö Ü/ü.

  537. Martin McEvoy wrote on :

    Ubiquity is stunning its worth the simple 5 second install just to use the twitter feature, Great work!

  538. Dean wrote on :

    Just so you know, I’m going to extend this for Presdo, I think it makes a great fit, and I’ve already done firefox extensions before. The Presdo natural language parser is a little more flexible, so hopefully I can inject the whole parser into parts of Ubiquity.

  539. Dean wrote on :

    Sounds ultra cool, there’s this scheduling service called Presdo that has similar natural language capabilities, but exclusive to event organization, this sound pretty easy to integrate with it.

  540. Aza Raskin wrote on :

    @Denny et al., Thanks for the kind words. We are super-excited about where this shared exploration of increasing the the connected-ness of the web means. I really cannot take the credit though. That goes to these folks.

    In particular, Atul for architecting and thinking about trust networks, Jono for the logic of the parser and fledgling internationalization, Blair for writing many of the commands, and Abi for being the glue (especially in documentation) that keeps things together. This is community-based collaboration.

    @Amr, Free Stuff: We have two such tutorials. The first is for users. The second is a step-by-step for all developers on how to extend Ubiquity.

    @Lars: Thanks. We’ve fixed it.

  541. Jimmy G wrote on :

    This is really awesome! Would love to see support for Google Apps for my domain

  542. laurie wrote on :

    great ideas!

  543. free stuff wrote on :

    If you want people to adapt it, write a book “Mozilla’s ubiquity for dummies”

  544. Mark Sandford wrote on :

    genius

  545. Fitch wrote on :

    Absolutely wonderful. This is how to get life done. Nice work, I hope there’s enough developer interest in this to bring this to the top of the popular plug-ins!

  546. GeekShadow wrote on :

    I’m very impressed Aza with your work !
    Actually I’m a Songbird Community Develloper and I want to explore a new way of this extension in Songbird 😉

  547. dsims wrote on :

    Very cool. It’s like Humanized.com’s Enso, but for the web.

  548. Lars Gunther wrote on :

    Clicked the Discuss link – got a load of porn. I hate porn. Who is in charge of keeping the discussion group clean?

  549. Amr wrote on :

    brilliant,
    you guys are just doing a terrific job here.. keep up the good work.

    I have one question, how will you make this tool open for everyone to write services or plugins for it so it can recognize more services and web sites.

  550. Amos wrote on :

    I’m stunned. This is fantastic thinking; I can;t wait to try it out.

  551. Denny wrote on :

    Wow. This is simplay amazing. This prototype is already quite useful, I can only dream about what is possile with this concept in the future.

    Good job, Aza. Keep it coming.

  552. John wrote on :

    I’m sure that I’m not the only one, before noticing it was coming from Planet Mozilla, thought:

    “What does maps have to do with Ubuntu’s graphical installer?”