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Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

[Posted August 27, 2008 by corbet]

Mozilla Labs has announced the first release (an "early experimental prototype") of "Ubiquity," a Firefox plugin intended to add a high-level command-line language to the browser. The best place to see what Ubiquity is trying to do may be the Ubiquity user tutorial. "Let's say I've found an interesting fact on a web page and I want to send it to Chris. I can select part of the page, including links, pictures, and anything else, and then issue 'email this to chris'. Ubiquity understands 'this' to refer to my selection."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Aug 27, 2008 18:02 UTC (Wed) by jordi (subscriber, #14325) [Link]

Someone should teach Mozilla people how Google works. I propose the following:

Come up with a great idea for a new Mozilla project.
Start hacking viciously on it.
Once it starts shaping up it's time to get a cool name for it.
When you think you have the appropriate name, look it up in Google, as the name might have been taken by another Free Software project.
Announce in your website.
Profit!

Just imagine how annoying it would have been if instead of Firefox, they had chosen an already taken name! Renaming such a prominent program must not be easy. :)

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

Posted Aug 27, 2008 18:26 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

They do seem to make this mistake a lot. Is this the third or the fourth
name collision?

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

Posted Aug 27, 2008 20:00 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]

You're absolutely right. They should call it "Firebird" instead.

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

Posted Aug 27, 2008 19:49 UTC (Wed) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

I like the warning box at the bottom of the tutorial - at least they are serious about getting people to listen.

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

Posted Aug 27, 2008 22:47 UTC (Wed) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Looks quite neat. A lot of these things are already doable using Quicksilver, Launchy and Gnome Do, but the browser integration of Ubiquity (having access to the current selection, without having to copy to clipboard first) is naturally much better.