14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has announced a major upgrade of its browser command-line tool Ubiquity, which has now reached version 0.5. The upgrade brings some new features and better internationalization to allow Ubiquity to reach a greater number of users. It’s still a Firefox extension for now but the company plans to integrate it with the browser at some point in the future.
"The original Ubiquity parser — the part of Ubiquity that takes what you typed and matches it to what you want to do — was based on English-centric assumptions. Some languages don’t use spaces between words. Some have the verb come at the end of the sentence. Some put different endings on nouns to identify what part of the sentence they are," Jono Xia, Brandon Pung and Aza Raskin wrote on behalf of the Ubiquity team. "Ubiquity 0.5 features a new input parser re-written from scratch to support many languages. You don’t have to be programmers to contribute to localization."
While a command-line doesn't seem to make a lot of sense today, especially in a browser, the tool can be very useful and get things done much faster than normally. And the functionality it already offers is amazing. Hitting CTRL + space (ALT + space on Linux) will bring up a console and you can start typing away. Just hitting a key will list a number of matching commands, hitting 'w' for example brings up the 'weather' command (which shows you the weather in an area you specify), the option to search wikipedia, a word count on any selection you've previously made and more.
The great thing about it is that you don't have to leave the current page to get the results; select a word, hit CTRL + space, type 'g' or 'google' and you get a Google search for the selected word inside the console. Typing 'map' and a location will bring up a Google Maps embedded in the console and so on. There is a calculator, you can send Firefox commands like closing a tab, you can even send a tweet from inside Ubiquity, and if the built-in commands aren't enough, there's a ton of third-party ones to fulfill every need.
The latest version of Ubiquity can be found here.