The next level of browser?

The other day, I saw something that Mozilla had come up with – Mozilla Ubiquity. In the shortest sense, it’s a way to create quick internet mash-ups from your browser without having to go to a bunch of different webpages to do it. If you’ve ever used the ENSO Launcher interface, it’s a similar method but browser-based.

You can learn more from the video below, but basically if you’re on a web page, you can select text and then use CTRL+Spacebar to activate a command structure to analyze/manipulate the data you selected. Type “map” and it will map the selected address in Google maps. Select a term or phrase and type “wiki” to get a wikipedia entry, or “ask-search“/”google“/”msn-search” to search on that particular engine. Type “flickr” to search the term on Flickr. Even better, it starts to predict what you want to do.

But it does more than that – you can also run commands such as calculator (“calculate“), switch tabs (“tab“), create a TinyURL (“tinyurl“) and more. Check out the video below, and then go download the prototype. Unless you have IE, that is. Then you can just suck it.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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One Response to “The next level of browser?

  • Woah, that looks incredibly cool, I’m going to have to try that. The way it lets you take the selection and use it on all those services would work really well for me. I am always copying/pasting things onto those sites you mentioned, or simply right clicking and going to Google search and then hoping a Wikipedia entry comes up, for instance.

    This looks cool, thanks for posting about it.

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