Mozilla Labs today released a preview version of the next major version of its Ubiquity extension for Firefox: Ubiquity 0.5, downloadable here. I’ve been steadily using the beta releases of it, and Mozilla has ambitious plans to make Ubiquity a standard part of Firefox. It’s a command-line tool, and while that may cause some to roll their eyes at the idea of typing commands in the age of the graphical user interface, it’s actually very useful. The new preview version has many major additions, including localization features.
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This week on the OStatic blog, we reported on Mozilla’s intent to wrap its Ubiquity project into an upcoming version 3.2 of the Firefox browser. If you use Firefox and haven’t used Ubiquity, now is a great time to get to know it. It’s a very powerful Firefox extension that provides a pop-up command-line interface for everything from doing quick web searches, to translating web pages to PDF documents, to jumping straight into webmail.
Ubiquity had a major update in January, and I’ve been using the new version since then. Here are a few applications for Ubiquity that those of us who live in browsers all day will appreciate.
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Many WebWorkerDaily readers use the Firefox browser, and if you do, today on OStatic we covered two extremely powerful Firefox extensions: Ubiquity and iMacros. Ubiquity adds a flexible natural language command line to Firefox, and is developed by the folks at Mozilla. iMacros sits in your Firefox toolbar, and lets you record tasks, whether they are frequently performed web development tasks, or simple tasks such as opening a series of tabs you use each day.
Here’s more on how these can be very useful for web workers.
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Last month Mozilla introduced Ubiquity, a keyboard interface for entering commands to your browser – I covered it on our sister site OStatic. One of the big features of this command line for the web is that it can be extended by anyone who cares to write a Ubiquity command – and the list of such commands has been growing. Among the things you can do that may be of web worker interest:
- Check whether a site is down
- Look up whois information, or ping a URL
- Save information to Instaper
- Create a Remember the Milk reminder
- Add pages to del.icio.us
- Grab info from microformats
Useful though these things are, one caution: in the current version, there are well-documented ways that a command author could smuggle malicious code into your machine. So make sure you understand the consequences if you start down the road of adding this functionality.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
