On Monday Mozilla released a new version of Ubiquity, the in-browser command line-like utility. While mostly a "stability" update, the add-on has undergone considerable cosmetic change as well, sporting a new dark plastic look. This look can be changed by anyone as part of a new styling system that uses simple CSS. Presumably, user-designed themes will go into an add-ons site as the product matures.
In addition to its new look, Ubiquity now borrows a few features from Firefox 3's "awesome bar." It remembers some of the commands you've used in the past and will let you hop to them right away when starting a new command. For instance, if you frequently use the integrated Wikipedia look-up, simply typing "w" into Ubiquity will pull it up as one of the top search options.
If you haven't yet tried Ubiquity I'd recommend giving it a spin with this update. It's come a long way since earlier releases and can be genuinely useful if you take the time to learn some of the commands. Future releases will no doubt smooth out that learning curve and make it a little easier for the less tech-savvy to approach. Along those lines, Mozilla is at work on a version that lets you pull it up and pick out menu commands with your mouse, just like a contextual menu.
The new version of Ubiquity has a dark plastic-like look and is much faster than previous versions. Click image for larger version.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Mozilla has put out a road map proposal for the next version of Ubiquity, the company's user interface project that aims to mash up user-controlled shortcuts with information from the Web. Besides the promise of an interface overhaul, the plan's big hope is to integrate Ubiquity with Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird products, along with user desktops.
In Firefox's case, Ubiquity integration for everyone (not just testers) could come as soon as version 3.2, due sometime next year. According to the road map specifications, the upgraded Firefox implementation would integrate Ubiquity into the "awesomebar," removing the need for users to learn a new keyboard shortcut to toggle it on and off.
The big caveat here is that any Firefox implementation would not allow third party commands for the sake of security, meaning you couldn't just start typing a new Gmail e-mail from your address bar. In such a case, users would be related to Firefox-specific shortcuts, and be required to use a separate instance of Ubiquity to take advantage of third party commands.
As for Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail software, the company hopes Ubiquity integration could change the way people search and manage their in-boxes. The spec says there's a need to "extend Thunderbird in ways that provide compelling advantages over Web mail." This could include things like deep integration with your system files and applications, to the point of being able to search for and add an attachment with just a few keystrokes--all without leaving the application or diving through a sea of nested folders in a pop-up menu. There's also a mention of having Ubiquity share the same set of command feed subscriptions, so if you subscribed to a new feed in either application it would be transferred over transparently in the background.
Of all of the proposed items, one that holds the most potential is integration with the user's desktop. This takes Ubiquity out of the walled garden of the browser and into user work-flow in other applications. It's the one area of the proposal with the least amount of detail, however it notes proper implementation would be in existing launcher services such as Quicksilver (for Mac) and Enso (for Windows). Presumably, when integrated with either of these, users would be able to begin to mash up items from their machine with Web services that much faster.
You can read more about the proposal on Mozilla's wiki page. See also our previous Ubiquity coverage, and Mozilla's demo video of what the product is capable of.
How popular can a piece of software get before being in "beta" is no longer a legitimate excuse for known software flaws? Or, to put it another way, is it responsible to allow hundreds of thousands of people to install your product, when you know ahead of time that doing so opens them up to attack?
The software visionaries at the Mozilla Corporation, which makes the popular Firefox web browser, have taken the approach that creativity and functionality is king--even if security has to take a backseat. Case in point: The widely praised "Ubiquity" software add-on, which brings an amazingly rich and extensible new form of interaction to the Firefox Web browser.
The technology press has showered praise upon the developers of this software tool. However, in prioritizing functionality over security, Mozilla Labs punted complex trust choices to end users--the vast majority of whom are ill-equipped to make such decisions. The end result is that the hundreds of thousands of users of Ubiquity face a significant risk of browser hijacking by attackers, which could result in the theft of e-mail and online banking account information.
Mozilla's Ubiquity in Action
Mozilla on Tuesday released a public prototype of Ubiquity, a curious command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. See: Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all.
At the moment, it's most capable as a command-line browser. You press the hot key, ctrl-space, and you can just start typing lookup commands, like "imdb Blade Runner." Or, if text is already selected in the browser, your command will act on them. Mouse over a restaurant page in Yahoo Mail, press the hotkey, and type "yelp" for a review, for example.
Ubiquity can find and insert map images into e-mails.
But the most interesting application is Ubiquity's capability to extract items from Web pages and insert them in whatever you're creating, like an e-mail message or a blog post. At the moment I believe the only site you can extract data from is Google Maps, but clearly Mozilla's direction is to build a platform that takes bits of data from Web resources and pastes it together on the user's behalf.
Microsoft, too, is putting resources into a new feature that parcels out Web pages. In the upcoming Internet Explorer 8, the browser supports a feature Microsoft calls, "Web Slices," which is the platform's capability to take a portion of a Web page--like a stock chart on a financial page--and display it as a pop-up widget that's called from the bookmark bar in the browser.
Slices on Internet Explorer are part RSS feed, part widget.
Slices are built using a combination of protocols, including Microformats, RSS, and new HTML tags that IE uses to demark Slices.
Together, Ubiquity and Web Slices lead me to believe we're entering an era of fracturing Web content. Already we have seen content separated from presentation with RSS, and we've given developers access to online data for their mashups via Web APIs. But the growth of Microformat-coded Web pages will make it possible for users to more easily create their own mashups--personal profile pages that have just the pieces of Web content they want, or e-mail messages made up of live maps, automatically updating weather forecasts, up-to-the-minute travel information, and so on.
It means that developers will have to learn how to code pages for modularity. Conceptually that's not that big a deal, although if coding for Ubiquity and coding for Slices is different, it's going to be a technical mess. What I am waiting to see is how managers wrestle with the branding and revenue implications of letting their sites be mashed up and refactored into tiny pieces all over the Web, by anyone. I predict that the sites that give away the most data will reap the biggest benefits, but that will be a difficult leap of faith for many publishers.
See also: ActiveWords.
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