How Ubiquity Will Change the Way You Browse the Web

Jeffrey Way on Feb 4th 2009 with 63 comments

Holey moley! Things are changing – almost to the point of being scary. We’re going to have a lot of catching up to do in the next several years, as we move toward the “browser OS”. Enter Ubiquity – a new Firefox extension that will change the way you communicate with the web. Though we’ve known about it for many months now, the lab has recently released a major update. Be sure to review this screencast, by Aza Raskin, that details exactly what Mozilla’s Ubiquity project is.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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Download the most recent version – 0.1.5 at the time of this writing.

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By Jeffrey Way

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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. Also, I'm finishing up my latest book on Laravel Testing! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.

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http://www.freshclickmedia.com Shane
New to me Jeffrey – thanks for posting.
Just goes to show how important semantic markup will be!
Tyler Osborne
Wow!
Jon
Yes, I have been using Ubiquity and I love it so far!
http://www.WarGraphicArts.com William A. Rodriguez
I think this is a great addition to the current technology. This will definitely change the web. Thanks for this post.
http://twitter.com/saurabhshah Saurabh Shah
i am using it since it has been released… it’s amazing … Guys use it … it really save the time …. and lot many feature …
http://www.instantshift.com DKumar M.
Nice addition !!
http://www.lexiq.ca Dennis
My head just exploded…. This is just too much awesome to handle.
Hassan
Could you please give a direct link to download the screencast? Our connection speed doesn’t allow us to watch it.
Thanks.
Sanid
this is really awesome , testing it right now
http://blog.brenelz.com Brenelz
Wow… this is really neat! Never heard of it until now..
http://www.pushingbuttons.net Timothy
This isn’t anything like a browser OS.
Here’s some, for example:
http://g.ho.st/
http://eyeos.org/
http://www.cornelios.org/
ubiquity is simply a plugin. It doesn’t even follow the definition of an OS.
noam
yayks wt went over here?? this seems almost futuristic :) hafta try that out!
great! thx all!
http://www.bensonarts.com abenson
What!? What!? What!? Incredible.
http://themeforest.net/user/JeffreyWay Jeffrey Way
Author
@Timothy – I obviously wasn’t implying that this was an OS. Surely, you can understand that.
I was merely stating that we’re moving in that direction.
D3
Ill try it now :)
http://resnodesigns.com Bryan P.
Mozilla does it again with an update that will change everything.
park
Wonderful presentation! Anyone tells me what software do they use to produce the presentation? Many thanks.
http://simon.vansintjan.org Simon Vansintjan
Wow future, here we come.
Next step: voice commands.
http://www.xeno10.com Derek Vigil
Our jobs are diminishing right before our very eyes.
Tread
There are some massive security issues if Ubiquity allows you to subscribe to other people’s commands. Those code snippets should be saved locally instead of linking to them from someone else’s page.
As cool as the service is, there is a huge security hole.
Albedo
So, to avoid having to go to and use various services, you have to go to and use a service (ubiq)? What’s the point of typing it into ubiq when I can type it all into my firefox address bar? One input is as good as the next. Why would I spend time embedding a map when pasting a URL is a two second procedure? Why would I want an extra plugin?
None of the features in the video jump out as a quantum leap. In fact, they appear to take more time than doing it the current way. Tossing someone a link in email isn’t exactly a time killer that ruins may days.
Carlos
This thing is very good. I saw this a while back.
The only thing is, is that most of us who know code and such will be able to figure this out and use this feature.
The normal web user who knows little to no coding will not want to sift through a bunch of documentation to figure out how to use Ubiquity. Granted this thing is awesome! But if they want a mass audience they will have to do one heck of a media blitz and some user centric tutorials for basic users.
http://www.reidknorr.com Reid
All I can say is… WOW haha
http://goalwala.com Michael Grech
eh…I use prism currently from the Mozilla labs and like it a lot. I think the idea of application specific browsers makes a whole more sense.
minardi
It seems the link is overflow :(
Dan
Looks cool, but it doesn’t seem like something a standard web user is going to utilize. Your every day computer user, ie my mom, her friends, etc, don’t even understand ctrl-c/v as an alternative to the right click menu.
It looks great for speeding things up IF you want to put the time in to getting comfortable with it.
For now, if I want to see something in wikipedia, I can just double click the word to highlight it and drag it into the wiki-search box in FF. I don’t know, as cool as that is, I don’t see it as anything close to epic.
http://www.demogeek.com DemoGeek
These are pretty nice feature sets for Firefox but the turning point for me with Firefox is it’s memory usage. Of course with all these plugins it is understandable that it will bloat the memory footprint but if Mozilla can spend some effort to come up with a clever way of handling the memory footprint with all those add-ons enabled that would make Firefox a killer.
Mike
Briteclick.com is a browser plugin at Techcrunch50 that does similar stuff. Still no idea when it’ll be available to the public though.
Damir
I love it!… makes my life much easier!
wjm
Why write in a bunch of words when you can just use a few clicks of the mouse?
It seems like a good idea for people that like keyboard shortcuts and love typing things.
Not everyone can type very well, but everyone can use a mouse.
http://titel.ro Constantin TOVISI
I must say I’ve just Twittered this myself as soon as I saw it. Can’t wait to have this in a stable release.
titel
Jeff
i have to say that I love seeing these types of things starting to pop up in browsers. It seems kind of the the accelerators you can create for IE8. One thing about the accelerators id that you don’t need to type out the commands (makes it more user friendly) just right click and pick the one you want.
Ubiquity, is a good experiment, but i just don’t see it as mainstream in its current operation. I can’t see the average user wanting to type in all those commands.
http://blog.insicdesigns.com insic
I must try this one.
Markus
Im sold.
fidel2414
wow , this is some amazing stuff for the true nerd:). You guys at nettuts.com rock. I visit this is site everyday. You guys provide extremely relevant material…..keep it coming
http://www.isaaccreative.com Isaac Gonzalez
I’ve been using it for a while and it’s great. Twitter updates, quick wiki searches, and dictionary look up just to name a few.
The other cool feature is the “add-to-calendar” function. I have Google’s Cal. and iCal synced which then allows me to quickly transfer everything to my iphone : )
http://web.madeofwin.de Ben
Well, I think the time when Internet should change has come :) Nice stuff.
http://jasonwilsondesign.com Jason
Maybe I’m just an idiot, but on OS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.* and Growl installed to the OS, I can’t get this to work. Firefox isn’t registering with Growl and all the Growl plug-ins are for Fx 2.*
Can anyone toss out how to fix this?
Also, for the nay-sayers. For every leap forward there is a crowd of people who just will not get it. Unfortunately it seems some of you are there. If you can’t see the potential here or why it is a good idea, I’m afraid you’ve missed the wave.
http://jasonwilsondesign.com Jason
Ha… nevermind. Needed the latest latest version of Fx.
Daniel Apt
Wow this is seriously awesome, bringing the future a lot closer to today!
http://parisvega.com Paris Vega
Holy crap!
Rob
Yeah no.
Maybe before we had tabbed browsing or multiple monitor displays, this would’ve been a big deal. As it is, this does nothing that my Firefox extensions don’t already do. So I have to *gasp* open a new tab, or *wince* click on a link! How have I lived this whole time using such primitive tools? It’s like we’ve all been banging sticks together in the woods!
Daniel Apt
Also now I´m already a converted user! Love it
http://jasonwilsondesign.com Jason
@Rob, lets look at the *gasp* click on a link horror for a minute. It seems like that is what most of the people who haven’t caught what this means are harping on.
Why is sending a map better than sending a link?
1. Eliminates an intermediary step for the recipient.
2. Eliminates the need for a stable internet connection on a portable device, you have the map there is no need to go get it.
3. The recipient doesn’t need to interrupt their reading to go and find the relative information your link sends them to.
“So I have to *gasp* open a new tab, or *wince* click on a link! How have I lived this whole time using such primitive tools? It’s like we’ve all been banging sticks together in the woods!”
It’s funny you put it that way. If that attitude had prevailed, we would still be banging sticks together in the woods. Who needs stone arrowheads, I’ve got a pointy stick! Who needs the motor car, I’ve got a horse buggy! Who needs the internet, I’ve got FedEX!
http://iamtibo.com/blog tibo
really impressive!!
Ethan
I like 0:37. I used Ubiquity before this, and it is pretty cool!
@Jason: Good point. Plus, if you are email someone on a phone, then it is REALLY SLOW.
http://www.jauhari.net/ Jauhari
Wow and really useful tools
http://www.pcbymp.nl/mennopietersen ThaClown
Soooo nice… i’m loving it!
http://www.kylesteed.com Kyle Steed
I think it’s good in theory, but will require a lot of relearning for the average internet browser. Most people don’t understand the shortcut keys that are available to them. So what makes the mozilla team so sure this will be a success? I’m not dogging on the extension itself, I may even try it out. But it seems to me like the normal computer user won’t understand. I hope I’m wrong though.
http://inelastica.com rob
incredible