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.

If you download the Ubiquity Preview Release and restart Firefox, you can hit your Ctrl key and your Space key at any time to conjure the extension. You can hit your Esc key at any time to shut it. There are many built-in commands for Ubiquity, and it becomes very intuitive to figure out which types of commands will perform which types of functions. All you have to do is type the first few letters of a command to conjure up a set of command choices from which you can pick.

For example, in the screenshot above, I have begun to type in an “email” command, and I already have options available to me for sending an email and more. Ubiquity is very web-aware, especially in the new Preview Release, so for many commands, it will immediately know that you might want to check a Wikipedia entry for a given term, or check your primary e-mail application, or convert a web page to PDF, and more.

The new Preview Release is much more globally focused than any of the betas were. It features a new input parser that has been rewritten to support many languages other than English. I also noticed that it does a good job of guessing what I want based on my location. For example, below I am typing in “weather” and Ubiquity guesses that I want the weather for San Francisco, which is where I am. This raises my eyebrows a bit because of the implied privacy concerns, but it is nonetheless useful, and very fast.

As another example of a command in action, below I have started to type the word “calculate,” and before I’m done typing, Ubiquity gives me quick choices for calculating, or for checking a Google calendar:

One major addition to the new Preview Release of Ubiquity is an interactive tutorial to help you get started. You don’t even have to invoke the tutorial. It’s available as soon as Firefox starts, after you install the Ubiquity extension. It consists of pop-ups that provide you with sample commands to try, and explains the suggestions that pop up as results.

This Preview Release is intended mainly for developers who want to test it and suggest improvements. I noticed a little herky-jerky interface behavior here and there, but no major bugs. It’s quite useful, and it works with the new Firefox 3.5. Consider giving it a try, unless you find a command-line interface to be completely retrograde. Sooner or later, Ubiquity will likely be built right into Firefox. Hopefully sooner.

Do you use Ubiquity? What useful commands have you found? What’s the No. 1 reason you’d recommend Ubiquity to people who aren’t yet using it?

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.

Ubiquity is a free Firefox extension, and once you install it, you can pop it up at any time by pressing Ctrl + Space. That combination of keys puts your live cursor directly into Ubiquity’s command line. In the screenshot above, I have begun typing the command “e-mail,” and even before I’m done typing I’m presented with a series of commands. I can choose to mail the web page I’m at to a colleague, or turn it into a PDF file, and more.

Ubiquity doesn’t restrict you to only canned commands, though. You can write your own commands easily, and Mozilla recently pointed out this online video as a good tutorial for beginning to create commands. The command shown built in the video is designed to look up members of Congress by zip code, but the instructions are detailed enough that you can start to create your own commands.

In my own use, I’ve found Ubiquity particularly good for on-the-fly web searches, and very fast definitions of terms I’m reading about online. I can execute the searches faster than I would if I navigated to a search engine, and if I type in a term such as “VPN” I’ll immediately see enough search results in Ubiquity that I know the term stands for Virtual Private Network, and have a sense of what one is.

If you build your command skills in Ubiquity, you can do much more advanced, scripted things, bordering on full-blown applications. I predict that a lot of Firefox users who aren’t yet using Ubiquity will appreciate once it’s in the browser by default. A command line interface may seem like retrograde, but Ubiquity gets its name from how ever-present it is, and how very fast it is for on-the-fly tasks such as searching or jumping into an e-mail message.

Here’s more on how these can be very useful for web workers.

Ubiquity is out in a new version 0.1.5 and even though Mozilla continues to refer to it as “experimental.” it’s already very useful. The new version adds interface and stability improvements, but the core utility of Ubiquity is the same: Aftery you hit Ctrl-Space to bring it up, it lets you type simple commands to get jobs done quickly.

As described and shown in the OStatic post, you can conjure Ubiquity up to quickly e-mail a web page to a web worker colleague, search across many search engines or services such as Wikipedia and Yelp, and convert and translate text, pages and documents. If you’ve ever used the useful pop-up utility Launchy, Ubiquity has a similar feel when it pops up, although its much more robust in terms of the commands you can give it.

iOpus, the maker of iMacros, now offers quite a few online demos and scripting examples in addition to the visual tour we’ve provided on OStatic. Like standard macros, this extension shines at taking repetitive tasks and letting you execute recorded steps for them, but my favorite use of all for it is Super Bookmarking. This allows you to record a series of macro-based steps that you can keep in Firefox’s Bookmarks menu, just as you do links to web pages. Take a tour of iMacros, if you dont already use it, and if you happen to be a web developer, it–along with Firebug–is an absolute must-have tool.

• 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.

Mozilla Labs shakes things up by Introducing Ubiquity

Om to Comcast: Show Us The Meter

The Vista Team gives us A Comprehensive Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Still using Firefox 2? Expect a nudge to upgrade