I just installed and tested the latest extension from the good folks at Mozilla Labs, called Ubiquity. So far, it has been a great experience. I am not good with words, so here is a description from the Mozilla Labs blog.
"Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
- Extend the browser functionality easily."
Ubiquity introduces a command line interface through which the user can issue interactive commands. And I repeat, Interactive. This is not the dull ms-dos command prompt (Dull?) most of you are used to (Ubiquity does introduce a new item to the context menu). Ubiquity is sensitive to every action you take on the
page. For example, if you highlight a word in a website and then bring up Ubiquity, you'll see several suggestions for that highlighted word. There are many other interactive commands and stuff, and the best thing is, you can define your own commands to do what you want. In this sense, Mozilla is making the user a kind of a programmer (without all the gory details). I have tried out the tutorial at their site and I suggest you do the same. Remember though, that this is still in beta, so don't try it if you aren't comfortable with tinkering around firefox.You can grab this extension from https://people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.xpi
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