Mozilla Labs' "Ubiquity" Helps Automate Web Interactions

Martin writes "Mozilla Labs have released a prototype version of the Firefox add-on Ubiquity. It is basically Launchy (the application launcher) for Firefox with the difference that Ubiquity makes use of web APIs and the Firefox browser. The official website contains examples, a command list, information about creating your own commands and of course the Ubiquity extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.x. Ubiquity can pull and send data to various services like Twitter, display, find and embed Google Maps, perform searches, write emails, add entries to the calendar, digg stories and more."

Comments

Danger ?

[UberHoser]

So correct me if I am wrong, but could the Black hats write something that could hijack this? Suddenly I am seeing bogus emails going out to my credit card companies, etc..

Ubiquity XForms

[leighklotz]

Interesting choice of name, given that IBM recently announced Ubiquity XForms, a 100% AJAX implementation of XForms which lets web application authors to use markup to control DOJO and YUI and other libraries, and which runs in Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera.

Its amazing

[ilovesymbian]

I just installed Ubiquity. Its amazing. They should have done this a long time ago.

Maybe its a good idea to have the top 10 social bookmarks in there, like Stumbleupon, Delicious, etc as well.

Re:Not sure what to think...

[nine-times]

My own view on this would be that a browser should help me in trying to reach/dispense 'information' with the least steps possible.

I just wonder sometimes why everything needs to be done in the browser.

It reminds me of one of their other experiments, Snowl. We used to have the newsgroups using its own protocol and application, and then that got replaced with forum web applications. Then that forum and weblog software started adding support for RSS so you could grab the feed and dispense with the defined UI. So then with Snowl it seems like they're essentially allowing you to treat the feeds like threads and reply directly-- and it suddenly made me wonder whether we're essentially returning full-circle to newsgroups, but using different protocols.

I don't have any real objections to the development, but there's been this general push to put everything into web applications, including e-mail, chat, discussion, and office applications. But then it seems like some of these browser experiments and extensions are being created specifically because we don't want to deal with websites. And that makes a certain amount of sense to me, because I'm the sort of user that much prefers to use a local IMAP client than webmail, and prefers to use a RSS reader separate from my browser, but the whole progression just seems a little weird and unplanned.

I'm half expecting people to declare IMAP to be obsolete in a new age of webmail, and then turn around in 5 years and build a complete e-mail client extension into the browser using XML to pass e-mail around, but no HTML for the interface. To me, the whole web application took a funny turn when I realized that Google Reader also published RSS, thereby allowing you to view their web-app RSS reader in a client-end RSS reader application.

It all make me wondering whether we might want to aim for a future without websites. Maybe not the complete end, but here's what I'm really starting to wonder: when I want to check the Wikipedia 10 years from now, will I be opening a web browser and typing "http://wikipedia.org"? Will the Wikipedia even bother to offer an HTML version? Or will they just have some database of articles with a pre-set API, and I'll be able to query the database for information from any number of applications, depending on the platform I'm using and the purpose of my query.

And then if that's the case, someone will have to develop a generalized viewer for these queries which would follow certain display specifications, and you'll end up with the reinvention of the web browser.

Blah. Sorry, I know this is kind of an aimless rant. But these Mozilla experiments do funny things to my head.

Linux support very third rate at present

[FreeUser]

(2)Those of Linux/Firefox + ubiguity with less/no money who don't pay the browser/OS/soc network but still have their online life lived for them, so they can live in the real world

First we need decent support for Linux in Ubiquity, which doesn't seem to be immediately forthcoming. They can't seem to decide on a toolkit to use for their transparent popup window a la Mac and Windows, so those of us using a free system are, for the time being, without many of Ubiquity's features. Since I'm not going to change platforms just to try it out, that makes it a lot less interesting than it might have been.