Mozilla Labs have released a very early alpha version of their new Firefox extension, Ubiquity. Yes, the name is a bit strange and hard to get behind, but after using it for 30 seconds, you’ll instantly sear it into your brain for good like I did. Ubiquity is all about using common, everyday language to open up the web and bring all of the different services you use everyday together. Everyone finds it annoying to see an address and then have to open up another tab to open Google Maps, or having to open Wikipedia to search for a weird reference in a blog you’re reading. It should be quicker and easier right? Well now it is.

I can’t explain Ubiquity any further without just giving you a few examples. How about you want to know what the weather is like outside. Normally I would go to Weather Underground, type in my city, and then search and wait for the new page to load. Ubiquity makes it easy. Option Spacebar opens up ubiquity right in your browser. Now just type ‘weather’ and then the zip code or the city you want weather for, and you’ll get this:

This pulls the information from Weather Underground and displays it right in your browser. Need more info? Just press Enter and you will be taken to the weather page for the place you searched for on Weather Underground.

You can also use Google Maps in Ubiquity. Just type map and then the address and you’ll get a Google Map thumbnail of the location right in the Ubiquity popup. And once again, press enter and your browser will take you to the map you searched for on Google Maps. I’m going into advanced mode here with this last example using Google Maps, but this really shows the power and possibilities that Ubiquity holds. If you’ve ever searched for apartments on Craigslist, you know how annoying it is to see the location of the apartment. You have to open up the listing, copy the address and then paste it in Google Maps. And then you want to easily compare the location of multiple apartments easily? Forget about it. In comes Ubiquity. Just highlight the listings that you want to map. Open up Ubiquity and type map-these. Ubiquity will search through the highlighted listings and map them all on Google Maps for you. Unbelievable.

Now Ubiquity is only in early, early alpha, but as you can already see, it is bringing all of the great services on the web together. Other than the services I mentioned here, it also works with Google Searching, Gmail, youtube, Twitter, iMDB, among others. Make sure you check out the Documentation to get the lingo down and find out all of the great services you can use after you download the extension. Enjoy.

Tags: extension, firefox, tips, ubiquity

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under tips & tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.