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Command Lines and the Future of Firefox
Barence writes "Mozilla has revealed how it plans to integrate plain text commands directly into future versions of Firefox. Dubbed Taskfox, the move sees Mozilla's Ubiquity project become part of the browser itself, allowing users to type commands directly into the address bar. You can, for example, type 'map cleveland street london' to bring up a Google Map of that location, or 'amazon-search the great gatsby' to find that book on Amazon, without visiting the website directly. 'The basic idea behind Taskfox is simple: take the time-saving ideas behind Ubiquity, and put them into Firefox,' the Taskfox wiki claims. 'That means allowing users to quickly access information and perform tasks that would normally take several steps to complete.'"
Search keywords have been in firefox for ages. I.e. right clicking on a search box in an arbitrary web page and turning it into a address bar command. I've used it to do all the examples in the summary.
How long will it be before they start selling "placement" services? Mozilla is non-profit but they could use the money to fund development.
In the beginning operating systems only had command lines.
Then the GUI replaced the command line.
Then the browser replaced the operating system.
Then the browser got a command line.
I was excited, thinking that the command-line was back, and I could ditch this horrible mouse interface. But then I read that it's only for skipping common search interfaces. Big deal.
What I wanted, what I want, what wolud actually get me to switch from IE to FF, what I need is to be able to control the browser from a command-line interface. I want to type something like "add favourite 'my favourite recipes' in 'food links'" and "go back" and "favourite 'my favourite recipes'" and "new tab 'live.ca'" and "close all other tabs".
I don't care about search. There's already as many serach bars as I want, and smart address bars, and ISP searches. Already if I serached for "amazon magic beans" I'd get a listing with the expented book about jack from amazon. I don't need fancier searching. I don't have trouble searching. I have trouble with slow interfaces to vast feature sets within browsers.
"stop loading images"
"javascript off"
"deny cookies"
"accept cookies"
"read privacy policy"
"view certificate"
"disable flash"
"maximize"
Hell, what I want is the windows key to pull up a generalized command-line interface, either to the OS or to the current application. I'm sick of long drop-downs, fly-outs, ribbons, menus, and checkboxes. I can type faster than I can click -- and who's ever heard of clicking without looking?
I use the command line almost exclusively apart from for web browsing and even then I still use lynx a whole bunch. Ubiquity strikes me as little more than a geeky circle-jerk involving GUI-weenies who think they're "1337".
When a command line user like myself looks at this and thinks "I hope I can turn this off with the rest of the crap*", you've got to wonder about the wisdom of adding it in the first place.
* prefetching, pings, safe browsing, search suggestions, that stupid default plugin thing and I guess I'll even be disabling audio and video at compile time with 3.5 since I've no intention of installing GStreamer.
Sure, it does do that.
But what if you type "Find cheapest BA flight from London to Las Vegas first 2 weeks in June and add to my calendar"?
Wouldn't it be neat if it actually did what you typed? Check out their site for examples of things you can *do* with Ubiquity rather than just things you can *find* with I'm Feeling Lucky
I'm not bashine Ubiquity (I actually REALLY like it), but you don't have to type "wikipedia" in the address bar either. 98% of the time "wiki " is all you need.
Note: this also works for other sites such as imdb.
I assume you're joking, but that elitist bullshit attitude is what I've spent most of my career defeating. My side will win in the end because we have the popular support.